RSU data curators gain insight into international data management practices during Erasmus+ mobility in Slovenia

From 5 to 8 May 2025, representatives of the Rīga Stradiņš University (RSU) Data Curator Unit, Līna Lāže and Viola Daniela Kiseļova, participated in Erasmus+ staff mobility for training at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia. There, they gained significant insight into research data management and promoting the Open Science movement.

During the visit, the data curators visited the Institute of Biostatistics and Medical Informatics (IBMI), which operates both as a structural unit of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Ljubljana and as a national ELIXIR-SI node, which is part of the European Life Sciences Infrastructure for Biological Information Consortium (ELIXIR).

Special attention was paid to the SPOZNAJ project, which is creating a professional support network for the implementation of open science at Slovenian universities. The meeting with project representatives and data curators from the University of Ljubljana allowed for an exchange of experience, examples of best practice, and discussions about future cooperation. Colleagues from the University of Ljubljana appreciated RSU’s achievement in creating an institutional research data repository, the Rīga Stradiņš University Institutional Repository Dataverse, and expressed interest in establishing a similar repository at their university in the future.

As part of the mobility programme, the data curators represented RSU with the presentation “Data Curators at the Intersection of IT, Research, and Data – Latvian Experience of Building the Research Ecosystem,” and they also conducted a lecture and a practical lesson for medical students at the University of Ljubljana on the basics of research data management.

From the left: Viola Daniela Kiseļova, Brane Leskošek, and Līna Lāže.

The experience they gained is significant in the context of RSU structural units and Latvian research institutions. The Slovenian example emphasises the need for a coordinated approach – combining institutional, national and international levels, to promote the implementation of open science and improve the quality of data management.