Science Set Free: OpenAIRE2020 in 10 Steps

Over 50 partners and 100 attendees gathered at the end of January in Athens. The event was more a conference, than a kick-off, here are the top 10 take-aways:

1. OpenAIRE2020 is 3-5 projects in one

OpenAIRE2020 has a grand vision: building on previous iterations, it is an infrastructure which now supports the OA mandate of the EC via a network of repositories, OA journals and information systems (CRIS). The project also includes a full complement of scholarly communication building blocks: research data management support, gold open access, usage statistics, research into new peer review approaches, Linked Open Data, a publication broker and global interoperability.

2. A community of practice across Europe to support Open Access

The EC has a strict OA mandate in place: If you get funded by Horizon2020, you are expected to make your research results openly available. All EU member states plus Iceland, Norway, Serbia and Turkey, represent OpenAIRE at a national level and support the mandate by encouraging researchers to deposit their publications in institutional or subject specific repositories. The national open access desks (NOADs) are the backbone of the project, and will reach out and support stakeholders such as policy makers, repository managers, project coordinators, and research administrators. OpenAIRE will complement this activity by providing a suite of support materials, webinars, and maintaining the established helpdesk.

3. Interoperability is the glue to its success

OpenAIRE consists of a network of repositories, to ensure global OA output is visible in a uniform way. The technical infrastructure now provides three sets of guidelines for its data providers: literature and data repositories and publishers, and research information (CRIS) systems.
There is an element of global flair: COAR (the Confederation of Open Access Repositories) will lead a work package to strengthen the relationship between European OA infrastructures and other regions of the world, including Latin America. Fostering discussion and common approaches across international repositories is vital to support the internationalisation of research.

4. It’s all about developing services

By developing a European-wide research information system (yes, a mini-CRIS) a range of services can be developed onto of repository contents. The potential is huge. For example, other national funders can have their projects’ publications identified, and EC project coordinators can use OpenAIRE for reporting publications to the European Commission and the European Research Council.

5. Two EC ‘pilots’ are supported

A Gold Open Access pilot is supported: details of this will be made clear in the next months: completed FP7 projects who wish to publish up to two years after completion will be eligible.

OpenAIRE will provide some support and training to the European Commission’s Open Research Data Pilot which stipulates that some Horizon2020 projects should deposit their research datasets related to publications in certified data repositories.

A study will investigate what legal issues are involved in the data pilot, as well as other public sector information (PSI) concerns.

6. Hot ‘Schol Comm’ Topics!

Metrics: an analysis of other ways of scholarly performance, based on OpenAIRE data will be carried out. The task will look at the core principles on which standards for OA metrics should be based.

Alternative peer review: A task will be carried out to analyse what is out there in terms of alternative peer review methods, and building a prototype for the social sciences and humanities. A tender will also be put out to explore new prototypes for open peer review.

Data citation: An evaluation of data citation in different disciplines will be carried out, with the aim of making data citation more effective. An interlinking service will be developed, standardise data citation formats and study its impact on disciplines.

7. Zenodo increases its scope

www.zenodo.org, now a well-established as an all-purpose repository, is now integrating with other services, from publishers’ workflows, to laboratory toolkits. More functionalities will emerge, with input from the community. With nearly 7,000 records, (including 2,000 software sets), Zenodo is growing and will be well-placed to support the EC’s open research data pilot for those projects that don’t have a data repository at hand.

8. Meanwhile, there is a lot happening behind the scenes

The technical infrastructure will continue to consolidate and improve the quality of its data. Data flows monitoring will be further improved, de-duplication mechanisms will be refined, and inference and research analytics will be a vital element. This means that research information will be automatically extracted from article full-texts, e.g. links between publications and data, research grants, classification schemes, etc. Research analytics then combine geographic and disciplinary aspects with funding schemes, to offer graphical views of how funded research is multi-disciplinary and distributed across Europe.

The development of a repository broker will add value: OpenAIRE will notify interested repositories and CRIS systems about OA publications and other value added information (status, IDs, Statistics) that may be relevant to them, e.g. should be in their collection.

Linked Open Data is also in there: the task will map OpenAIRE content onto suitable standard LOD ontologies, then expose it via the LOD APIs and hook it with the LOD cloud. Anonymisation tools will be developed to support sensitive scientific data in OpenAIRE.

9. OpenAIRE will be longer than a project

OpenAIRE will set itself up as a legal entity. A set of goals and a mission statement will be agreed on and legal advice will be sought. A membership and governance model will be developed by the end of 2015.

10. OpenAIRE2020 will influence the scholarly communication landscape

Last but not least, OpenAIRE has the power to change.

‘You are now young adults…everything that was …an idea…has now become reality…you as OpenAIRE have the means to do something extraordinarily positive for scholarly communication!’
As the above observation from Jean-Claude Guédon, University of Montreal encapsulates, this new project merges and brings closer nearly all aspects of the emerging and exciting scholarly communication landscape. And a large and impressive team are committed to heading to the right goal: European science, set free.