Recently, I was invited to deliver my talk on the openness (open data and open science) in the context of Society 5.0 during the International Conference and Expo on Nanotechnology and Nanomaterials. It was very pleasant to receive an invitation to deliver the invited talk on my recently published article Smarter Open Government Data for Society 5.0: Are Your Open Data Smart Enough? (Sensors 2021, 21(15), 5204), which I have entitled as “Open Data as a driver of Society 5.0: how you and your scientific outputs can contribute to the development of the Super Smart Society and transformation into Smart Living?“. The paper has been briefly discussed in my previous post, thus, just a few words on this talk and overall experience. Although I have participated in different conferences as a speaker delivering presentations on my ongoing studies, this was my first experience of serving as an Invited Speaker, which is a sort of “Welcome to the senior league!”.

So, what was the main idea of the talk? Today, the open data and portals that provide these data and which can be accessed and used by everyone for their own needs became a daily phenomena. These phenomena became popular in science, contributing to the development of the concept of the “open science”, according to which making findings of the research available to the audience by means of articles, preferably OA, is not enough. Therefore, some more advanced guidelines have been defined and involved (or are involved, as is the case for (bio)medicine). These topic became valuable for both scientific and societal areas at (inter)national level. However, these initiatives, as well as users’ intent for open data, are evolving continuously and today, in line with IoT and smart city trends, real-time and sensor-generated data are of greater interest to users. This is all the more relevant for research-related data. These data may lead to solving problems that were not central research objects to the original data holders, improve previous results, establish cooperation to tackle challenges together. In addition, these data are considered to be one of the crucial drivers of a sustainable economy and can have an impact on information and communication technology innovation and become a creativity bridge in developing a new ecosystem in Industry 4.0 and Society 5.0. Although there are some studies reporting on open data and open science, understanding how and whether they have a positive impact on our lives at various levels and drives real transformation of the society, science, governments etc., this topic requires extensive work. Thus, in this talk I have provided my recent findings on this topic with some evidences of the importance of an “open science” trend, following the principles of open data. The aim of the talk is to make everyone ask themselves “am I promoting open science?” and “how can I promote open science?”.

To sum up, this was the first Invited Talk I have delivered and this was a great experience at the larger stage…. and… what to say, I liked it! It was a pleasure to get a very positive feedback on the talk and to see an interest from the researchers representing very medicine-related domains. Thank you, the International Conference and Expo on Nanotechnology and Nanomaterials.