The FP7 project OpenAIRE aimed to support the implementation of Open Access in Europe. It provides the means to promote and realize the widespread adoption of the Open Access Policy, as set out by the ERC Scientific Council Guidelines for Open Access and the Open Access pilot launched by the European Commission.
Its successors OpenAIREplus was aimed at linking the aggregated research publications to the accompanying research and project information, datasets and author information. The goal is to make through the portal www.openaire.eu, as much European funded research output as possible available to all.
This research output, whether it is publications, datasets or project information is not only accessible through the OpenAIRE portal, extra functionalities are also offered, such as statistics, reporting tools and widgets – making OpenAIRE a useful support service for researchers, coordinators and project managers.
OpenAIRE relies heavily on a decentralized structure where there is a representation in all member states (the so-called NOADs or National Open Access Desks) who can give specialized advice. If you have a question about a country-specific situation, you can contact them.
Researchers working for European funded projects can participate by depositing their research output in their own repository, publish with participating journals or deposit directly in the OpenAIRE repository ZENODO– and indicating the project it belongs to in the metadata.
Dedicated pages per project are visible on the OpenAIRE portal.
OpenAIRE’s three main objectives are to
i. build support structures for researchers in depositing FP7 research publications through the establishment of the European Helpdesk and the outreach to all European member states through the operation and collaboration of 27 National Open Access Desks;
ii. establish and operate an electronic infrastructure for handling peer-reviewed articles as well as other important forms of publications (pre-prints or conference publications). This is achieved through a portal that is the gateway to all user-level services offered by the e-Infrastructure established, including access (search and browse) to scientific publications and other value-added functionality (post authoring tools, monitoring tools through analysis of document and usage statistics);
iii. work with several subject communities to explore the requirements, practices, incentives, workflows, data models, and technologies to deposit, access, and combine research datasets of various forms in combination with research publications.
50 partners, from all EU countries, and beyond, work on OpenAIRE2020 project that aims to promote open scholarship and substantially improve the discoverability and reusability of research publications and data. The initiative brings together professionals from research libraries, open scholarship organisations, national e-Infrastructure and data experts, IT and legal researchers, showcasing the truly collaborative nature of this pan-European endeavor. A network of people, represented by the National Open Access Desks (NOADs), will organise activities to collect H2020 project outputs, and support research data management. Backing this vast outreach, is the OpenAIRE platform, the technical infrastructure that is vital for pulling together and interconnecting the large-scale collections of research outputs across Europe. The project will create workflows and services on top of this valuable repository content, which will enable an interoperable network of repositories (via the adoption of common guidelines), and easy upload into an all-purpose repository (via Zenodo).
OpenAIRE2020 will assist in monitoring H2020 research outputs and will be a key infrastructure for reporting H2020’s scientific publications as it will be loosely coupled to the EC’s IT backend systems. The EC’s Research Data Pilot will be supported through European-wide outreachfor best research data management practices and Zenodo, which will provide long-tail data storage. Other activities include: collaboration with national funders to reinforce the infrastructure’s research analytic services; an APC Gold OA pilot for FP7 publications with collaboration from LIBER; novel methods of review and scientific publishing withthe involvement of hypotheses.org; a study and a pilot on scientific indicators related to open access with CWTS’s assistance; legal studies to investigate data privacy issues relevant to the Open Data Pilot; international alignment with related networks elsewhere with the involvement of COAR.