Building Capacity for FAIR and Open Science: Insights from the World Café sessions at the OSCARS 1st AGM

PREPRINT in submission process to Open Research Europe Journal This paper presents the outcomes of the OSCARS World Café sessions held on 3-4 March, 2025, at the OSCARS Annual General Meeting in Rome, gathering researchers, data stewards, infrastructure operators and stakeholders from the Science Clusters and the OSCARS ‘Open Calls’ projects. The event fostered exchange, collaboration and consolidation within the OSCARS community, with discussions on numerous topics relevant to Open Science: Competence Centres and their possible dashboards, Composable Data Services, Mentoring, associated strategy for communication, dissemination and sustainability, community engagement in FAIR practices and expectations of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). Ideas and proposals were documented, prioritised and validated collectively by participants, distinguishing actions with strong consensus (“preferred”) from complementary suggestions. Key findings emphasise the importance of competence centres as gateways for training, support and data quality validation processes, together with metadata harmonisation, mentoring and recognition mechanisms, joint communication strategies and sustainable integration of project results into infrastructures and EOSC. By combining capacity building, knowledge transfer and practical service design, this paper provides a roadmap to strengthen FAIR and Open Science practices across Europe.