The National OpenAIRE workshop for the UK

On the 15^th of March 2018, we ran the national OpenAIRE workshop for the UK in Birmingham; during the day, there were presentations on three separate projects: Mike Mertens talked about OpenAIRE2020, which concludes at the end of June 2018 and OpenAIRE Advance, which continues much of the work of OpenAIRE2020 until December 2020 consolidating those achievements while working to shift the momentum among its communities to Open Science, aiming to be a trusted e-Infrastructure within the realms of the European Open Science Cloud; and Leo Mack and Paolo Manghi spoke on OpenAIRE Connect, which aims to provide technological and social bridges, and deliver services enabling uniform exchange of research artefacts (literature, data, and methods), with semantic links between them, across research communities and content providers in scientific communication.

There was also a presentation from Dom Fripp on the Research Data Shared Service, which Jisc is building and which has the potential to engage with OpenAIRE, to enable researchers to easily deposit data for publication, discovery, safe storage, long term archiving and preservation. This means that they will be able to provide sustainable access to research data so it can be re-used.

Neil Jacobs did the introduction to the day, as well as a presentation on the engagement with COAR’s Next Generation Repositories, highlighting the report, “Behaviours and Technical Recommendations of the COAR Next Generation Repositories Working Group.” Since Jisc will continue to engage with OpenAIRE potentially with a range of our services, Jane Anders did a presentation on SHERPA/RoMEO, which provides information on publishers’ policies, and Sherpa Juliet, which helps provide information on research funders’ open access policies, as well as the directory of open access repositories, or OpenDOAR. There were also presentations on the Institutional Repositories Usage Statistics Portal, or IRUS, the UK’s national aggregation service, which provides COUNTER-conformant usage statistics for all content downloaded from participating UK institutional repositories. RIOXX was also represented, which is a metadata application profile providing a mechanism to help institutional repositories comply with the RCUK policy on open access. CORE (COnnecting Repositories) was there, too, a Jisc-Open University collaborative project, which offers aggregation of open access content from UK and worldwide repositories and open access journals. It provides a range of services including discovery, analytics, and text mining access. All of these engage with OpenAIRE on various levels.

Dale Robertson focused her presentation on the European Open Science Cloud, or EOSC for short, explaining how it will work to become a “truly European project” which engages with OpenAIRE, Jisc, and more than 80 key scientific stakeholders.

A considerable portion of the day was then structured around Co-Design, with a hands-on effort to consider the development of “a killer app”.

The day was obviously packed and hopefully useful and informative on what is happening in the UK and Europe regarding efforts supporting the development of Open Science.  All the presentations are now available, but get in touch if you’d like to learn more about the collaborations and engagements: !