e-Infrastructure for Open Access
Specific challenge: Europe needs a robust e-infrastructure supporting Open Access policies, also for Horizon 2020. This infrastructure, based on already existing e-infrastructures (institutional and thematic repositories, aggregators, etc.), should support reliable and permanent access to digital scientific records. A key element will be capacity building to link literature and data in order to enable a more transparent evaluation of research and reproducibility of results. Such an action will include an analysis of alternative means of public support to Gold Open Access in order to identify the optimal approach. The Open Access mandate and the Open Data Pilot of Horizon 2020 impose new requirements for the infrastructures to fully support participants to comply with their obligations and objectives. Therefore, a key objective will be to provide service driven infrastructures to enable wide participation in the Open Data Pilot.
Scope: Proposals should address all the following activities:
(1) Service-driven data e-infrastructure responding to general and specific requirements of researchers and research organisations for open access to and deposit of scientific information (including journal articles, books, monographs, conference proceedings, thesis, grey literature, software and data, as well as services linking literature, data and software). This e-infrastructure will further develop the research capacity through a coordinated and participatory architecture linking institutional and thematic repositories across Europe with scientific information to be used by humans and machines. An essential part of this service-driven approach will be helpdesks designed to support the producers and users of scientific information, human networks to support data sharing and implementation of Open Access policies in Europe, as well as the promotion of technical solutions for sharing of sensitive data (e.g. patient data). The e-infrastructure should be incorporated as a legal entity within the first year of the project. Relevant indicators on the take-up of open access in Europe including for both publications and data should be elaborated and reported upon regularly. The project will promote a limited set of biblio- and webometrics that reflect open access policies. It will collect bibliometric data on publications, citations, data citations, etc. on all Horizon 2020 scientific output (including on the Open Data Pilot) and produce both standard and on-demand statistics.
(2) Developing proof of concept and prototyping new services in support of open science (e.g. new forms of publishing, innovative services based on data mining, new forms of peer review etc.), assisting researchers and educators in everyday tasks. This includes the accessory task of piloting a mechanism to stimulate publishing in open access journals by paying authors part or all of the article processing charges they incurred after the end of their grant agreement with the Commission[1]. The proposal should indicate the maximum amount to be paid per ‘Gold’ open access publication. Up to three post-grant publications that occur within the two years following the related EU grant expiring may be eligible. Any other conditions that would be necessary to enable as many authors as possible to participate and to ensure that this service contributes to the development of a sustainable and competitive market for scientific open access publishing should be indicated. The duration of the pilot should be 12 to 24 months unless the available budget is exhausted before. Proposals should consider barriers (including legal) to data sharing in the context of these new services and assess the possibility of pan-European information sharing agreements considering the authentication and authorization infrastructure described in topic EINFRA-7-2014.
(3) Supporting the global interoperability of open access data e-infrastructures and linking with similar initiatives across the globe in order to complement the physical access to research facilities with data access and to ensure that Europe plays a leading role in international collaborations.
It is expected that one proposal will be selected. A maximum of EUR 4 million of the total budget for this topic is foreseen for the article processing charges under point (2).
Expected impact: The intellectual capital of Europe is available to researchers, business and citizens to generate economic and scientific advances now, and that capital is safely preserved for further exploitation by future generations. Open Access publications resulting from Horizon 2020 funded research are available and easily findable online. Data needed to validate published results is linked to the publications and publicly shared whenever possible. Accurate science metrics for Horizon 2020 can be produced with almost no effort. Most of the European institutional repositories (at least 80%) as well as the principal thematic repositories are part of the same interoperable repository network.
Type of action: Research and innovation actions
[1] The pilot foreseen in activity (2) allows for the provision of financial support to third parties in line with the conditions set out in Part K of the General Annexes.