Improving and coordinating technical infrastructure for institutional open access publishing across Europe

This topic is addressed to not-for-profit institutions (such as universities, research centres, funders and other institutions supporting research and the dissemination of research outputs within national remits, e.g. national libraries) that run open access publishing initiatives for the public interest (non-commercial), in particular, publishing activities of journals and/or publishing platforms, and which do not levy article processing charges (APCs). Recent years have witnessed a sharp increase in open access publishing activities. Alongside commercial publishers who are in the business for publishing for profit, technology advances have enabled research-performing and other related organisations working for research to develop scholarly publishing infrastructures and services in the new digital environment, either continuing existing activities in print or in an entirely digitally-born environment. Such open access services operate in most European countries, in some cases with a national remit.

This topic aims to improve efficiency, coordination and technological alignment among the network of institutional open access publishing infrastructures and to develop and provide the technical specifications to ensure interoperability, interconnection and improved quality of services to researchers. Proposals shall build on already existing and operational publishing services across Europe and embed the open access publishing network into the EOSC ecosystem.

Proposals should cover each of the following activities:

1. improve the understanding of technologies and services in such institutional not-for profit services across Europe and provide recommendations for further alignment and interoperability;
2. coordinate the development and adoption of common technical solutions for interoperability, cross-referencing, cross-linking, and sharing metadata across the European Research Area and beyond;
3. support the implementation of technical specifications required to provide services through the EOSC, and the adoption of the essential solutions and standards (e.g. APIs, PIDs, metadata frameworks, ontologies, AAI etc.) to improve findability, accessibility, interoperability and re-usability of digital objects within the network of publishing infrastructures and in the EOSC federation.

Projects under this topic should liaise with Horizon Europe funded initiatives in the Work Programme Widening participation and strengthening the European Research Area which address the non-technological aspects of institutional publishing under topics HORIZON-WIDERA-2021-ERA-01-43: Capacity-building for institutional open access publishing across Europe and HORIZON-WIDERA-2022-ERA-01-42: Supporting the development of aligned policies for open access books and monographs.

To ensure complementarity of outcomes, proposals are expected to cooperate and align with activities of the EOSC Partnership and to coordinate with relevant initiatives and projects contributing to the development of EOSC.

In this topic the integration of the gender dimension (sex and gender analysis) in research and innovation content is not a mandatory requirement.