Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe 2020

Project Information

OpenAIRE2020

Grant agreement ID: 643410

DOI

10.3030/643410

Project closed

EC signature date 8 December 2014

Start date 1 January 2015

End date 30 June 2018

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Research Infrastructures

Total cost

€ 13 132 500,00

EU contribution

€ 13 000 000,00

Coordinated by

ETHNIKO KAI KAPODISTRIAKO PANEPISTIMIO ATHINON
Greece

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - OpenAIRE2020 (Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe 2020)

Reporting period: 2017-01-01 to 2018-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

OpenAIRE has been working on establishing an open and sustainable scholarly communication infrastructure responsible for the overall management, analysis, manipulation, provision, monitoring and cross-linking of all research outcomes (publications, related datasets, software and services) across existing, planned and future repositories. Promote the discoverability and reuse of data-driven research results, across scientific disciplines and thematic domains.
Towards its objective OpenAire2020 is moving gradually in forming a Legal Entity. The steps toward the legal entity are:
o First, to establish a non-profit legal entity set up in one of the MS and with the explicit provision that other legal entities may be part of the OpenAIRE LE. The choice of jurisdiction should reflect the most favorable for the LE tax regime with the lowest possible cost with regards to formalities and paperwork.
o Second, to start working on the establishment of the Open Science Partnership as a landmark initiative by the community with the support of the EC in order to secure the involvement and commitment of the Member States.
o Third, 12 months after the OSP and the original OpenAIRE LE have been established, to initiate a process for establishing an OpenAIRE ERIC, having taken care of the operational, organizational and governance needs of the OpenAIRE community.

OpenAire has the mandate for the FP7 Post Grant OA Pilot
As of early December 2016, the FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot has already funded over 550 Open Access publications arising from more than 530 finished FP7 projects (real time progress report can be found in the OpenAIREPost-grant FP7 Pilot portal). Five months away from its Apr 30th, 2017 end-date, the uptake for this post-grant funding initiative keeps steadily increasing and the awareness among eligible researchers and project coordinators is higher than ever before. This is a direct result of the intensive dissemination campaign for the initiative, that has included presentations at many of the National OpenAIRE Workshops held in different countries in the past few months. This outreach activity critically also covers direct communication with authors within the joint work with publishers for the implementation of the pre-payment agreements.
Besides the standard APC/BPC funding mechanism, a parallel work line has been initiated for the implementation of the Alternative Funding Mechanism for APC-free Open Access journals and platforms. Eleven (11) bids from ten different European countries were selected for funding and are now working on the technical enhancement of their platforms with features such as OpenAIRE compliance, automatic collection of funder information in the article metadata or ORCID implementation among others. A mid-December workshop for the funded bidders was held in The Hague to enable a face-to-face discussion to explore synergies across frequently overlapping technical work.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Network Operation
The monthly newsletter continue to go from strength to strength as instruments for NOAD engagement, allowing NOADs to contribute stories from their regions and informing the network of key developments in Open Science in Europe.
The ‘NOAD Guide’ was revised for 2016 and was distributed early in the year to give update NOADs of the tasks ahead and set out all actions in more detail.

Dissemination
6 factsheets have been created and updated for specific stakeholders, on specific themes, and have been downloaded from our site. The OpenAIRE blog continues to be a big success. 2016 saw more than 75 blog articles published (up from 52 in 2015) on a great range of themes related to OpenAIRE, Open Access and Open Science, including national updates, conference reports and updates on the progress of project tasks. The blog is open to direct editing by all project partners, and is a great engagement tool, especially for the NOADs, making the OpenAIRE blog a wide-ranging and important source of news about Open Access and Open Science from across Europe.me was delivered, adding further resources to the training package (video recordings, slides).

Training and Support
Activities were centered on the gathering, creating and disseminating support and training material. The team developed or revised a set of support tools:guides, FAQs, helpdesk, factsheets, information & dissemination material, copyright issues update and briefing papers. In parallel, an intensive webinar program

Technical Activities
OpenAIRE maintains four technical infrastructures including the production, beta, testing and development environments, each with its own backend and frontend. These include dedicated servers for individual services as well as separate Hadoop clusters for compute intensive tasks (again for testing, production, and a dedicated cluster for inference operations), adequate storage (separate for backups) hosted at ICM data centre facilities. A new cluster setup running on Cloudera Hadoop version 5 (CDH5) has been set up, configured and tuned for optimum performance to support the SPARK environment, the new system underlying the IIS.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Research Impact
Going beyond the EC we have initiated collaborations with national funding agencies to provide the same funding extraction services. This will is an ongoing activity throughout the project life time and will result in the Funder Monitoring Dashboard, currently under design.The table below illustrates the progress on differentfunders, run on full texts.

Based on OpenAIRE data for FP7, OpenAire has produced a first draft report to correlate OA EC’s publications with citation analysis metrics. The final report will be published in May 2017, to allow synching of FP7 publications from OpenAIRE with the (annual) release of Web of Science to produce the most relevant and complete possible analysis.
The first draft study already delivers an interesting perspective on the European research landscape, the successful teams when it comes to EU funding from the FP7 programme, and the way these teams published in open access journals or not. Compared to other studies, we found that these teams do reach relative high impact scores on their open access format published research outputs. Yet another interesting finding was that in particular the East European member States seem to be relatively more successful in publishing in open access journals, as compared to their Western European partners/and/or competitors. More specifically, universities or research institutes in the engineering domains are quite successful in open access publishing.

openaire2020