Bielefeld University contributes to OpenAIRE with two specific units for two specific areas to the proposal: the library for major contributions to the technical e-Infrastructure of OpenAIRE and the CITEC with its highly-profiled researchers in the domain of cognitive systems/interaction/robotics for the focused studies on subject specific requirements. 

Bielefeld University Library is not only heavily involved in international initiatives for research infrastructures processing scholarly information (e.g. BASE, DRIVER, PEER, Knowledge Exchange) but has also contributed significantly to shape the German landscape of digital research libraries as well as digital scholarly information services, e.g. through the development of the Digital Library North-Rhine-Westphalia "DigiBib", today hosted by the academic library centre "hbz" in Cologne for nearly 200 libraries. With respect to conventional library services, Bielefeld University Library performs top-notch (Rank 2) on a national scale according to the German university ranking CHE. The main areas of expertise to be contributed to OpenAIRE is resulting from the work on information infrastructures, specifically on aggregating and networking high numbers of open document repositories The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE), for example, aggregates since 15 years distributed repositories, by providing access to about 160 Mio. publications from 8000 international sources (March 2020). Further contributions concern the linking of repositories to CRIS systems (in the context of Knowledge Exchange) and usage data (in the context of PEER). Since Bielefeld University Library is responsible for general data management aspects in OpenAIRE, it will also lead the studies on subject-specific requirements for primary and secondary research data.

Contact persons

CASPUR (http://www.caspur.it) is an Italian non-profit organisation established in 1992, encompassing nine universities from central and southern Italy. CASPUR’s goals are: to develop and maintain a supercomputing centre giving high-end scientific computing services for associated universities and Italian research organisations; to promote advanced tools and technologies in Information Management and Information Technologies fields devoted to scientific research and development; to become a competence centre for the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research and Italian universities in Information and Communication technology techniques usage and good practice dissemination; to establish synergies with national and international organizations devoted to ICT research and development; to set up, together with 3^rd parties, jointly activities, whose scopes are inside the objectives of CASPUR consortium.

CASPUR was partner of OpenAIRE from 2009- 2012. In 2013 CASPUR  merged into Cineca.

The Institute of Information Science and Technologies (ISTI) of theItalian National Research Council(CNR), which is organised in 16 laboratories, is committed to producing scientific excellence and playing an active role in technology transfer. The team participating in this proposal belongs to the ‘Multimedia Networked Information System Laboratory’, which consists of 48 researchers and technicians conducting research and development activities on algorithms, techniques and methods for information modelling, access and handling, as well as new architectures and system services (P2P and Grid-based) supporting large networked multimedia information systems.

The CNR-ISTI team has been involved in many EU-funded projects relevant to the topics addressed in this proposal, namely in the following FP6 projects: DELOS II NoE (No. 507618, Scientific Coordinator), DILIGENT (No. 004260, Scientific Coordinator), MultiMatch (No. 033104, Coordinator), BRICKS (No. 507457), BELIEF (No. 026500), CASPAR (No. 033572), DRIVER (No. 034047), SAPIR (No. 45128). It is currently involved in the 7^th FP projects: EFG (No. 517006), DRIVER II (No. 212147), D4Science (No. 212488), TrebleClef (No. 215231) and BELIEF II (No.223759).

In the context of the proposal, the CNR-ISTI team will be responsible of the technical coordination of OpenAIRE (WP1) and of the supervision of software production and maintenance workflows in SA and JRA (WP6). Furthermore, the team will be responsible for design and development of content management functionalities for the OpenAIRE System: in WP5 (SA), by coordinating the definition of the System data model and delivering the relative management services; in WP8 (JRA), by delivering research data management prototypes for future System extensions. Finally, the team will participate to technical support activities for third-party organizations willing to interact with the System.

Contact persons

• Donatella Castelli
• Paolo Manghi

The French consortium Couperin is a successful partnership experiment of research, public and educational institutions (256 members: 107 universities, 89 schools, 29 research institutions and 31 other institutes). Under the leadership of its Administrative Board, Couperin is structured in one Professional Board (10 members) and two departments:

• The Pricing and Purchasing Department manages all the negotiations with the publishers and is organised in thematic areas.
• The Prospective and Tech Department is commissioned, for expertise and evaluation for the Professional Board on issues regarding information systems and OA.

Couperin has long been an advocate of OA. The Couperin Manifesto issued in 2005 states very clearly that "COUPERIN is involved, next to other information stakeholders (SPARC, BOAI, ICOLC...), in promoting free and alternative scientific information, and invites all french researchers to commit themselves to these new publishing models, which can today and must tomorrow find a large place besides traditional publishing, for the major profit of researchers, of users and of Science, in short, of free circulation of ideas and knowledge."
It is in this perspective that Couperin set up an OA Working Group which gathered in 2016 around 50 people every two months in order both to create an information portal on OA for Higher Education institutions (http://openaccess.couperin.org/) and to encourage universities to create Institutional Repositories and adopt OA policies.
Couperin's involvement in the OpenAIRE project will be built on the experience gained in the OA Working Group. The network and the tools created then will be of first help in the establishment of a National OA liaison office in partnership with other French stakeholders.

Contact person

• André Dazy

EMBL-EBI will represent the subject area 'Health' in year 1, and collect the disciplinary requirements for infrastructural OA services in that domain.

EMBL-EBI is the European Bioinformatics Institute, located in Cambridge, UK (www.ebi.ac.uk). It is an international research and service institute, an Outstation of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). EMBL is an international research organisation with 20 member states, most of which are also EU members. The mission of EBI is to collect, organise and make available open access databases for bio-molecular research. It serves a collection of public domain databases along with tools to search, download and analyse their content. These databases include DNA sequences and protein structures, gene expression information, molecular interactions and pathways. Connected to these are linking and descriptive data resources such as protein motifs, ontologies and many others. In many of these efforts the EBI is a European node in global data-sharing agreements involving, for example, the USA and Japan. The EBI has a staff of about 350, most of whom are software engineers, database curators and support staff who maintain 24/7 access to +400 terabytes of data from the biomedical domain.

The utility of the EBI to the scientific community today is evidenced by massive use of its services. Typically its web portal sees well over three million hits per day from a user community of several hundred thousand individual scientists from all over the world. The community served ranges from academic scientists doing basic research to industrial researchers in diverse areas including pharmaceuticals, agriculture and nutrition. Alongside the core service activities, the EBI is a basic research institute, with bioinformaticians regularly publishing results of computational investigations of bio-molecular information. It has also a flourishing Industry Cooperation and SME support programme for European companies involved in bioinformatics.

Contact persons

The National Documentation Centre (ΕΚΤ) is the national institution for aggregation, documentation, information, dissemination and support on science, research and technology issues. Founded in 1980, EKT is integrated with the National Hellenic Research Foundation (NHRF) and is supervised by the General Secretariat for Research and Technology of the Ministry for Development. The NHRF is a multidisciplinary Research Centre established in 1958.

EKT's mission is to act as a backbone for the Greek national infrastructure for the development, organisation and provision of science and technology content. EKT services are offered to the country's entire scientific and business community, universities, research centres, enterprises and public and private sector bodies. Examples of services include the National Archive of PhD Theses, the Serials Union Catalog of Greek libraries, the institutional repository of the NHRF (helios-eie.ekt.gr) and a thematic repository for the Humanities (pandektis.ekt.gr). EKT has been National Contact Point for FP7 and currently for Horizon 2020 in several subject areas and the co-ordinator of the Greek branch of the Enterprise Europe Network. The organization also develops the National Information System for Research and Technology.

EKT is a pioneer of Open Access (OA) in Greece, having been the first Greek organisation to sign the Berlin Declaration on OA to Knowledge in the Sciences andHumanities in 2003. EKT is a strong supporter of open access as a means for social and economic development and is at the forefront of national and international open access initiatives that support the development and implementation of relevant policies for scientific and cultural data, including repositories, peer-reviewed electronic journals and CRIS. EKT activities for the promotion of OA in Greece include the creation of a relevant informational portal (http://openaccess.gr), hosting numberous  international conferences (http://openaccess.gr/conferences/?language_id=1).

Contact persons

• Evi Sachini
• Nikos Houssos
• Panagiotis Stathopoulos
• Margaritis Proedrou

Ghent University has a history of being an early bird in Open access philosophy and spreading these ideas further, both on a national and international level. Home university of Herbert van de Sompel, developer of OAI-PMH, Ghent University was the first Belgian university (2003) to have an institutional repository, and has spread this idea through the country on national meetings and conferences. The expertise and enthusiasm allocated in the UGent library team, combined with their geographical and linguistic situation, and wide network, make them well-suited to be the regional OA Helpdesk. They could both offer practical as well as more strategic advice, as far as either the installation of a Helpdesk and the establishment of Open Access policies by repositories are concerned. It can also help setting up deposit guidelines assigned to the needs of researchers and technical teams.

Contact persons

• Inge Van Nieuwerburgh
• Emilie Hermans

The Göttingen State and University Library (UGOE) is one of the largest libraries in Germany and a leader in the development of digital libraries. It plays a key role in leading the Networking Activities in the EC-funded DRIVER project, building the digital repository infrastructure for Europe. UGOE is one of the leading open access institutions and hosts open access initiatives in measuring usage statistics, reference linking, citation analysis etc. UGOE also hosts the secretariat of DINI (German Initiative for Networked Information). It has collaborated with the other group members to develop the DINI guidelines, "Certificate Document and Publication Repositories" and "Electronic Publishing in Higher Education". Moreover, UGOE coordinates the development of open-access.net, a national information platform on Open Access (all information also available in English) and reaches out to expand over the German-speaking regions.

• Norbert Lossau
• Birgit Schmidt

Helsinki University Digital repository, HELDA, contains research articles as well as digital data and other types of digital objects (including student thesis and e-learning materials). The research articles are deposited to the open repository through university’s Research Information System.

In this project we are participating in WP 2 and 4.

Contact persons

• Pauli Assinen, Helsinki University Library
• Kimmo Koskinen, Helsinki University Library

Contact email address: openaccess-info [at] helsinki.fi

IMI–BAS as coordinator of the Bulgarian network and provides support to Bulgarian institutions and researchers. The annual Info Day on Open Access to Scientific Information, organized by the Institute, invites:

The initiative brings together professionals from research libraries, open scholarship organisations, national e-Infrastructure and data experts, IT and legal researchers, showcasing the truly collaborative nature of this pan-European endeavor.

• representatives of national institutions (including the Ministry of Education and Science, Ministry of Transport, Information Technologies and Communication, Ministry of Culture) responsible for the development of open access policies;
• representatives of Bulgarian institutions (research institutes and universities) active in the implementation of open access policy and programme.

Main Actions:

• We are preparing an action plan for three years for Open Science and considering the next steps with the Minister of Education and Science. At the same time, we will begin talks with scientific publishers about preferential pubs for publishing open access

• Presenting Bulgarian works in the area of open access and open science in the co-organized by the European Commission and the Bulgarian Presidency of the Council of the European Union events.

• Preparing Terms for Creating an Automated System and a National Portal (including Standards and Specifications) for Open Access to Scientific Information (link1)

• Preparing an action plan to set up the Bulgarian Open Science Cloud (link2)

• We spoke about OpenAIRE at “The European Open Science Cloud: Austria takes initiative” in Vienna, Austria, on 30 October 2018 which was co-organised by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research and the Library and Archive Services of the University of Vienna.We participate in the panel “The European Open Science Cloud. Domestic experiences vs the pan- European experiences” and presented the Bulgarian plans for the cloud.

• We spoke about OpenAIRE at the International Data Week 2018 (IDW 2018) held on 5–8 November 2018 in Gaborone, Botswana. Hosted by the Botswana Open Science and Open Data Forum, IDW 2018 bring together data scientists, researchers, industry leaders, entrepreneurs, policymakers and data stewards from all disciplines and geographies across the globe. We presented our view Towards Pro-Innovative Models for Efficient Use and Continuing Development of the Digital Culture Ecosystems.

• We spoke about OpenAIRE at the international conference “e-infrastructures for excellent science in southeast Europe and eastern Mediterranean” https://vi-seem.eu/2018/04/03/regional-conference/

• We spoke about OpenAIRE at The Digital Assembly 2018 (https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/events/digital-assembly-2018-sofia) take place on 25 and 26 June in Sofia, Bulgaria.

• We spoke about OpenAIRE at the organizing of the e-IRG workshop under Bulgarian EU Presidency. The workshop will take place on 14-15 May in Sofia, Bulgaria. A session dedicated to the current developments of the European Open Science Cloud is organized. The tentative agenda for the workshop in at: http://eirg.eu/e-irg-workshop-may-2018

• We spoke about OpenAIRE at https://www.digitalinfrastructures.eu Europe’s leading e-infrastructures invite all researchers, developers and service providers to participate to the third edition of Digital Infrastructures for Research conference, which will be held this year in Lisbon, Portugal, at ISCTE University Institute of Lisbon, from 9 to 11 October 2018. The DI4R 2018 conference is jointly organised by EOSC-hub, GÉANT, OpenAIRE and PRACE.

The Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAS), being the coordinator of research in Bulgaria, intends to establish a network of scientific Open Access centres. IMI-BAS will be the key point repository in the Bulgarian network providing support for academic researchers.

Furthermore, workshops, training actions, communication events on the use of the infrastructure for scientific communities will be organised by IMI-BAS together with the Bulgarian Information Consortium (BIC) and Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics of Sofia University. This will raise the awareness amongst possible content providers and advise them on the use of the repositories.

The Eighth International Conference on Digital Presentation and Preservation of Cultural and Scientific Heritage - DiPP2018aims at presenting innovative results, research projects and applications in the field of digitisation, documentation, archiving, representation and preservation of global and national tangible and intangible cultural and scientific heritage. The main focus is to provide open access to digitised cultural heritage and to set up sustainable policies for its continuous digital preservation and conservation.

DiPP2018 Conference, Workshop on Open Access to Scientific Publications, Data and Data Science

Contact persons

• Peter L. Stanchev ?subject=[openaire]
• Georgi S. Simeonov ?subject=[openaire]

Izmir Institute of Technology is one of the state universities in Turkey and one that was established in 1992 with a view to offering a high level of education and carrying out research in technological fields. The medium of education at our Institute is English. It is one of the two Turkish institutes of technology, which are the most advanced models of technical universities in today's world.

Contact persons

Gultekin GURDAL

Gonul KAFALI

Partner Profile

Role in the Project

DANS is the Dutch NOAD in OpenAire 2020 and the regional coordinator Research Data Management.

Contact

Elly Dijk

The National Library of Sweden (NL) combines the mission of a “traditional” national library with that of a national library authority. Promoting open access essentially concerns the accessibility of Swedish research publications and thus fits very well with other tasks of national libraries, such as maintaining national bibliographic services, receiving legal deposit of and providing long-term access to digital documents. In 2010 the NL Sweden adopted an open access policy covering several fields of activity. 

NL Sweden coordinates and is the main funder of a national  programme – OpenAccess.se. The programme was first implemented during 2006−09 in partnership with Swedish university libraries, with the Association of Swedish Higher Education, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Swedish Research Council, and the Swedish Knowledge Foundation.

After a favorable evaluation by international experts in 2009 it was then transformed into a permanent programme. The national library has involved the former partners and some new bodies - a funder (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond) and an OA publisher - to participate in the steering committe. The steering organization of the programme has been enlarged with two new working groups mainly populated by active repository managers.

The programme OpenAccess.se promotes open access to the works produced by researchers, teachers and students by supporting open access publishing - OA repositories and OA journals - at Swedish institutions of higher education. The programme has three action lines:

- information and advice

- coordination of policy

- development of infrastructure and services

The programme lays more stress on information about open access to Swedish researchers, who now will have to respond to recent OA mandates from research funders and universities. As a consequence the official website www.openaccess.se has been radically refocused towards having researchers and the general public as its core audience. This is also coordinated with the NL Sweden being the National Open Access Desk of the EU project OpenAIRE. The “inside” information for the Swedish open access community is now available on a more informal website, based on blog software. This site is open for direct participation from the community, but still run by the NL Sweden and linked to the official website. 

Open access policy issues is another major theme. The Ministry of Education and Research announced at the Meetingplace Open Access meeting in November 2009 that it was going to formulate a national OA policy.  Discussions have been initiated with the Ministry on how to implement this, and the steering committee of the programme has sent a formal proposal to the Ministry arguing for a national policy and giving suggestions about its general outline. The programme also has also been active in organizing a dialogue between funders and higher education institutions about open access. 

Finally the programme continues to support the development of infrastructure and user services, building on earlier work. Repositories have to be user friendly and keep a high quality, new kinds of content have to be accommodated, the support for Open Access journals in Sweden should be strengthened and coordinated. The development of services will now more than ever have to unfold within the framework of an international infrastructure for Open Access repositories.

Landspitali - The National University Hospital of Iceland is threefold; service to patients, teaching and training of clinical staff and scientific research. The hospital offers diverse clinical services in outpatient clinics, day patient units, inpatient wards and clinical laboratories. The hospital's support offices provide a range of services related to human resources, finance and economics, information technology and operations.

Contact persons

University of Latvia (UL) performs a function of  the national open access desk for the project OpenAIRE-Advance in Latvia.

National Open Access Desk (NOAD) Latvia is the scientific establishment that encourages and promotes the Open Access and Open Science initiative for the staff of the scientific institutions, researchers, PhD students, research project managers and coordinators, as well as information specialists and librarians, data experts, data repository managers to support the scientific research and data publishing in open access.

UL has started the open access movement in Latvia since it is the regional representative of the OpenAIRE project. UL has took part in OpenAIRE and OpenAIREplus projects and continues to develop its functions in OpenAIRE2020 and OpenAIRE-Advance projects by representing those in the country and by building successful collaboration with project partners abroad. UL has participated in FOSTER and PASTEUR4OA projects.

• Gita Rozenberga (UL Library, NOAD Latvia, e-mail: )