OpenAIRE NOADs and the FP7 Post-Grant OA publishing funds Pilot dissemination

Following the FP7 Post-Grant OA publishing funds Pilot webinar for National Open Access Desks (NOADs) held last May 19th, some NOADs expressed their interest in supporting the initiative by having it disseminated to institutions and researchers in their countries. The Pilot welcomed this offer and committed to sharing best practices in dissemination arising from the work of the most proactive NOADs, which could provide a useful example for others to follow. This post provides a summary of the different dissemination and support initiatives taken up by specific NOADs.

The Jisc in the UK have just published a post on their involvement in OpenAIRE2020, where the Gold OA Pilot is heavily featured. A comprehensive Pilot dissemination campaign has also been kicked-off by the Jisc which will involve contacting appropriate national-level stakeholders such as ARMA, RLUK, UUK or UKCoRR so that they will in turn reach out to their member institutions.

The University of Vienna in Austria – who are both a NOAD and an institution collaborating in the Pilot kick-off with LIBER – have collected a list of eligible FP7 projects for funding in Austria and examined the data in the supplied spreadsheet. When checking that information against the project data contained in their institutional systems, they found that the project coordinator field was often incomplete and/or mistaken, so they have thoroughly checked and updated this information for Austrian FP7 projects.

Last May 22nd, the Italian NOAD CINECA delivered a Gold OA Pilot presentation at an event held by the Agency for the Promotion of European Research (APRE) in Rome.

http://www.slideshare.net/OpenAIRE_eu/il-gold-open-access-pilot-per-le-pubblicazioni-post-fp7-grant-breve-introduzione?related=1

NOADs in different countries (Romania, Spain, Hungary) are also occasionally supporting the process for replying to requests for more information that arrive from researchers and institutions in their countries. NOADs will usually lie much closer to researchers than the Pilot coordination, so it makes sense for them to carry on with specific explanations in the national language.

On top of this, additional dissemination exercises are being carried out by institutions involved in the Pilot kick-off: a number of institutional webpages providing information on the Pilot for eligible scholars and project are gradually coming up (incidentally in different languages) at institutions like the University of Glasgow, U Vienna or the Spanish National Research Council. Additional institutions like the Universitat de Barcelona have also already put up a Gold OA Pilot page for their researchers.

Institutions are also using their lists of eligible FP7 projects to identify the institutional researchers and project coordinators involved in them so they can be sent an email from the Library or (even better) from the Vice-Chancellor for Research. The identification of eligible researchers will usually need to be done at institutional level, as the names of the researchers involved in eligible projects are not featured on the eligible FP7 project lists. Institutional project management systems or CRISs (where available) can effectively support this step, but evidence is being collected anyway on how demanding this process may get just in case any external support were required for the purpose at specific institutions.

This coordinated dissemination effort is starting to pay off, see data below for registered users at the OpenAIRE central service for funding request collection and processing – whose number has just reached a hundred. Three APCs have so far been approved and funded from the project, which have arrived from Thessaloniki, Belfast and Budapest. This is of course not too many of them yet when compared for instance to the 3,000 APCs that UCL processed last year, but the figures should start sharply rising rather soon as a result of the effective outreach by institutions and NOADs.

The 3-hr Gold OA Pilot workshop to be held next week at the LIBER Annual Conference in London should also provide a very useful opportunity for a wider dissemination of the initiative – 88 institutions, researchers and publishers have registered for attending this event.

The Pilot coordination is grateful for all the support that's arriving from interested institutions and remains available for arranging joint dissemination activities with NOADs and institutions where possible.