Laura Morales, an ambassador for open data and open science

Laura Morales has been selected as an Ambassador to help raise awareness and increase open science contributions from researchers in ethnic and migration studies in Europe throughout 2023. This RDA / EOSC Future Ambassador role comes with a small grant aimed at funding the awareness-raising activities.

While most researchers in the social sciences are aware of the Open Science and Open Data agenda and have heard about the FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability), very few actually know what this entails in practice for their everyday research activities and undertakings. This motivated the Research Data Alliance (RDA) and the H2020 EOSC Future project, two initiatives to open up research data, to appoint “ambassador” researchers, whose role is to raise awareness on tools and good practice among colleagues from the same research field. Until the end of September 2023, Laura Morales (Full Professor at CEE, Sciences Po) will thus contribute to the onboarding of key research groups in the ethnic and migration studies field into the universe of Open Science in Europe. Her goal as an RDA / EOSC Future Ambassador is to achieve a greater level of awareness of, engagement with and adoption of (1) RDA activities and recommendations (of which she has been a member since 2018), and (2) EOSC (the European Open Science Cloud) as an overall infrastructure and set of tools to provide access to research data across borders and scientific disciplines.

Laura Morales has a longstanding interest in quantitative surveys on the inclusion of ethnic and migrant minorities in Europe and she has played a major role in making these data available. Between 2017 and 2021 she was the Chair of COST Action 16111 - Ethmigsurveydata and an active participant in the H2020 research infrastructure cluster project SSHOC, where the main data infrastructures of the social sciences and humanities (SSH) have joined forces to ensure the inclusion of SSH in EOSC a reality. The work she has coordinated has allowed the creation of a number of FAIR resources to enable the discovery and the reuse of survey data on the inclusion and integration of ethnic and migrant minorities across Europe: the Ethnic and Migrant Minorities (EMM) Survey Registry and the EMM Question Data Bank. The EMM Survey Registry was awarded an Open Science prize from the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research in 2022.