On the 19th of November, 2019, the first Israeli OpenAIRE National Workshop –titled: On the Way Towards Open Science: "Set Science Free" took place in Bar Ilan university (BIU). The event was organized by the Iseraeli OpenAIRE NOAD Dr. Simcha Meir along with the libraries and information system department of BIU. With around 180 attendees, mainly librarians and researchers from all universities, and also a large number of colleges, representatives from various funding organizations: the Planning...

In the week of October 21st-27th 2019, OpenAIRE has organized a series of activities to highlight its continuous engagement with Open Access and Open science. Over 700 viewers participated in our Webinar Series, where specialists talked about RDM, H2020 policies, the OpenAPC project, Inclusive Science and a primer for open access journals on how to become Plan S compliant. We much appreciate the special participation and contribution of S.Venkataraman, Thomas Margoni, Emilie Hermans, Christoph B...

 On April 23, Elsevier and the Norwegian Unit jointly issued a press release, announcing a two-year pilot agreement on access to research and open publishing. This news took many by surprise since Unit only the month before had announced its decision not to renew their agreement with Elsevier. This decision came after a lengthy period of negotiations and was not made lightly. We quickly got back to our talks with Elsevier, however, and were able to work out the details of the pilot in a ver...

Dutch Copyright Act offers an alternative route to open access  The Dutch universities will give open access an extra boost by starting a pilot to make publications available after six months in collaboration with researchers.  In order to achieve the Dutch ambition of 100% open access in 2020, we have made agreements with many publishers regarding open-access publishing. Currently, this is not yet possible for all types of publications or journals. That is why, starting February ...

AT2OA-workshop “Open Access Monitoring - Approaches and Perspectives”, Vienna, April 2018Authors: Steve Reding, Patrick Danowski, Andreas Ferus, Anna-Laetitia Hikl, Tobias Zarka, Mario Schautz, Gerda McNeill, Olivia Kaiser, Michael Zojer, Mail: Europe Open Access strategies with specific goals like 100 % Open Access in 2025 are getting published. To evaluate the status of this goals an Open Access monitoring is necessary. Different countries like Denmark and Finland have a...

This has been an extremely important improvement for the open access in Turkey. The Council of Higher Education (YÖK) National Theses Center and Turkey OpenAIRE NOAD  had worked hard to make compulsory open access to theses and dissertations. As a result of these efforts, the Art. 10 of Law numbered 7100 has been entered into force upon publication of the Official Gazette numbered 30352 and dated March 06, 2018. According to this article, which constitutes Additional Art 40 of Higher Educat...

In January 2018, Spanish Government published the State Plan for Research, Development and Innovation 2017-2020 that includes important news on open access to scientific publications and research data. The State Plan is the main instrument of the State Government for developing and achieving those objectives set at the Spanish Strategy for Science and Technology and Innovation 2013-2020, and at the Europe 2020 Strategy. The funding priorities included in the National Plan are granted through com...

It was only 30 years ago that the first public research centres were founded in Luxembourg, but today research and innovation have settled as core priorities to contribute towards the country’s economic diversification and future prosperity. On Thursday 26th of October 2017, as part of the Open Access Week (23-29 October 2017), researchers from all research institutions within Luxembourg were invited to participate, discover, discuss the broad and valuable topic of Open Science. Being Luxembourg...

On the occasion of the OpenAIRE workshop "What is the social, economic and academic impact of Open Access and how can it be measured?", we had the chance to meet Carlos Galan-Diaz, who gave a very nice speech on the impact of research on society. Carlos is Research Impact Officer at the University of Glasgow, and we were curious to know what exactly his job was about. Thanks Carlos for answering our questions, and enjoy the interview! Q. Can you tell us more about the initiative of the personal ...

An exciting recent article on the LSE Impact Blog proposes a European Open Access Platform for research. This idea is very much in line with OpenAIRE’s mission of building a public research publication infrastructure and as such we welcome the authors’ vision. A public platform for the dissemination of research will become essential infrastructure to finally fully integrate research publishing and dissemination into the research lifecycle, rather than seeing it as an added-extra to be outsourced...

Guest Post by Danielle Padula, Community Development officer for Scholastica, email: ’s no secret that the cost of corporate-run academic journals is skyrocketing. A 2007 study found the average list price of for-profit journals to be four times higher than that of not-for-profit publications. Rising journal subscription prices have increased support among the academic community for publishing scholarship open access (OA), or free to read online. But on its own OA publ...

For a small academic and research community like Croatia it is important to build national collaborative infrastructure at different levels and for different purposes. Institutional repositories are for last twenty years an important strategy for attaining open access, and provide a key infrastructure for the long-term preservation of digital materials. Apart from HRČAK repository of OA journals (with 415 OA journals) and Croatian Scientific Bibliography CROSBI with more than 30.000 deposited fu...

On October 7th 2016, the French Law for a Digital Republic Act (LOI n° 2016-1321 du 7 octobre 2016 pour une République numérique) came into force, following a one year open review process during which the draft law could be improved by citizens. This law introduces new provisions to regulate the digital economy, online cooperative economy, data protection and access to the internet. Two articles are of specific concern for scholarly communication, as they relate directly to open access...

Last November 16th, 2016, the Argentine government published a law entitled “Creación de Repositorios Digitales Institucionales de Acceso Abierto”.The law establishes that all institutions which are part of the National Science and Technology System that receive funding from the Argentine federal government must create an “institutional digital repository” that provides free and open access to all publications (including technical-scientific works, academic theses, journal articles, etc.) In add...

Guest post by Kathleen Shearer, Executive Director, COAR“The reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated” (to paraphrase Mark Twain)Last week COAR published a response to an article written by Richard Poynder on September 22, 2016. Although some of Richard Poynder’s comments definitely reflect the current reality, he made a number of other somewhat questionable assertions, in particular that institutional repositories (IRs) have failed.Poynder's comments reflect a creeping narrative enter...

Rich Savage, CC BY 2.0 A group of young researchers, science administrators and librarians of the Open Access Network Austria (OANA), released the first version of The Vienna Principles: A Vision for Scholarly Communication in the 21st Century. The group under the leadership of Peter Kraker discussed the relationship between Open Access and Scholarly Communication intensely and with great passion. After more than a year of research, serious debate and analysis of pro and cons across the subject ...

As both Geoffrey Bilder and Martin Heidegger tell us, infrastructure is usually invisible and we only notice it when something goes wrong. This is profoundly problematic for scholarly communications, since infrastructure is also law – it shapes thoughts and actions. Luckily, moments of breakdown (like the SSRN sell-off) help illuminate problems with the system and call on us to change what is broken.[caption id="attachment_1000" align="alignleft" width="232"] CC BY-SA David Wright"Infrastructure...

On Tuesday 17th May, the scholarly communications community on Twitter erupted at the news that publishing giant Elsevier had acquired the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), a pre-print and publishing community focusing on social sciences and law. The acquisition seems designed to continue Elsevier’s move away from a content-driven business strategy towards one oriented on services and the monetisation of data and analytics, building on their purchase of Mendeley. Elsevier’s press release s...

In April of this year University College Cork (UCC) hosted a 2-day training event focusing on Open Access Data in Horizon 2020. The event was sponsored by FOSTER and organized jointly by UCC Boole Library and Repository Network Ireland. Day one was aimed at researchers and others who were interested in developing Horizon 2020 proposals. The speakers on day one were •    Martin Donnelly from the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) (Martin was unable to attend on the day so his presentati...

In April of this year University College Cork (UCC) hosted a 2-day training event focusing on Open Access Data in Horizon 2020. The event was sponsored by FOSTER and organized jointly by UCC Boole Library and Repository Network Ireland. Day one was aimed at researchers and others who were interested in developing Horizon 2020 proposals. The speakers on day one were •    Martin Donnelly from the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) (Martin was unable to attend on the day so his presentation were taped i...