Partner's description

The Institute for the Management of Information Systems (ATHENA RC/IMIS) is the newest institute of the Research and Innovation Centre in Information, Communication and Knowledge Technologies "Athena", and started operating in March 2007. ATHENA RC/IMIS conducts research and participates in R&D projects in the area of data management and large-scale information systems. The current focus of research at ATHENA RC is on the following areas:

• Workflows for data integration and system interoperability. Focus is on Digital Libraries, Ontology Engineering and Data Warehouses.
• Large Scale Distributed Information Systems. Focus is on Real-Time Information Systems, like sensor networks, and p2p networks/Grid-based systems.
• Web Information Systems. Focus is on Web data management issues and Semantic Web technologies.
• Geographic information systems. Focus is on data integration and user contributed information.

The key personnel of ATHENA RC have a long and pertinent experience in participating and leading European funded projects. They are partners in a large number of projects of National and International scale. More particularly, the ATHENA RC people have a rich and long experience in several topics of computer Science such as Software Engineering, Databases and Knowledge Bases, Experiment Management Systems, Workflow Management Systems, Digital Libraries, User Interfaces, Personalization, Data Warehouses, Data Mining, and Distributed Systems, and have participated in several relevant research and development projects. Those funded during the last five years many research projects in FP6 and FP7. The ARC team's expertise with respect to the these projects includes: (i) In OpenAIRE, the DNET based infrastructure supporting the EU and ERC OA initiatives: deposition and access of EU and ERC funded publications ; (ii) Leadership in supporting framework architectures in DRIVER (DNET powered), DILIGENT, D4Science, D4Science-II, HEALTH-e-CHILD; (iii) Participation in projects promoting the further development and interoperability of digital libraries in DELOS, DL.ORG, BELIEF14 and scientific GRDI202015; (iv) Providing services in digital libraries projects in TELplus and PAPYRUS.

Contact persons

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

 The Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) is an association of repository initiatives with international membership. Launched in October 2009, COAR now has members of over 100 institutions worldwide from 35 countries in six continents. Its mission is to enhance the visibility and application of research outputs through a global network of open access digital repositories.

As part of the OpenAIRE2020-consortium, COAR is leading a work package on international alignment. As such, COAR has already been working previously on a number of aspects of alignment and promotes the interoperability of open access (OA) repositories on an international scale. Through its member institutions COAR is working towards the development of a global Open Access repository community of practice from across counties, regions and disciplines. Our vision is a global knowledge infrastructure of networking Open Access repositories. COAR’s working groups address the acquisition of content for repositories, interoperability, and training and support actions. In particular, one working group is exploring best practices and expertise in the area of populating repositories, including the implementation of OA policies and working with publishers. COAR’s working group on interoperability has started a discussion process on interoperability with the aim to develop a COAR Roadmap for Global Open Access Repository Interoperability. Moreover, COAR’s third working group explores needs for support and training to be addressed in workshops and other activities.

Contact persons:
Kathleen Shearer, and
Katharina Müller,

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

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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

ABOUT

Slovak Centre of Scientific and Technical Information(SCSTI) is the specialised scientific library and a national information centre for research, development, innovation and education. It is a directly managed organisation of the Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic.

The mission of the Slovak Centre of Scientific and Technical Information is to contribute to science and research promotion in Slovakia, particularly through building and operation of complex information systems developed for research and development. The SCSTI is responsible for administration and operation of the Central Information Portal for Research, Development and Innovation, the Central Registry of Evidence of Publication Activity and the Central Register of Theses, including the Antiplagiarism system. The institution acts also as the Technology Transfer Centre with nation-wide operati and the National Centre for Popularisation of Science and Technology in Society. The centre also hosts the Slovak network of NAtional Contact Points for Horizon2020 and is responsible for operation of the Slovak Liaison Office for Research and Development in Brussels.


CONTACT

Lubomir BILSKY ()

Jozef DZIVAK ()

Eva ZAMECNIKOVA ()

On the occasion of the launch of the European Open Science Cloud on November 23rd, the European Commission disclosed the list of the people appointed to be members of the EOSC Executive Board.

The call for applications opened at the end of August this year to recruit 11 experts in matters related to research infrastructures representing all stakeholders, with the task to provide advice and support on the implementation of the EOSC: from the rules of participation, to making  research data interoperable and re-usable according to the FAIR principles, to guidance to service provision.

We are very proud to announce that Natalia Manola, Managing Director of OpenAIRE, is among these experts! This appointment is a recognition of the importance of Open Science and what the OpenAIRE infrastructure represents in Europe for the full success of the European Open Science Cloud. The community and network of National Open Access Desks and the rich set of services bring Open Science at all levels of the research life-cycle and assist in the transition to open research and knowledge sharing. The participation in the EOSC Executive Board, in addition to OpenAIRE’s contribution to the EOSC Portal with its services, will support positioning Open Science as a best practice for research in all its nuances, at the core of the European Open Science Cloud.

OpenAIRE participates in the EOSC Executive Board together with other relevant initiatives such as RDA, CESSDA, Science Europe, GÉANT and many others.

The selection criteria together with the full list of the members of the EOSC Executive Board is available on the EC’s website.

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

CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, “where the Web was born”, is funded by 20 European member states and has a yearly budget of approximately 1,000 MCHF. CERN has 2,250 permanent staff coming from the 20 member states and hosts about 10,000 High Energy Physics (HEP) scientists from all over the world.CERN houses and operates the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is be the world’s largest and most powerful scientific instrument, providing data to four experiments each with up to 3,000 scientists and engineers coming from more than 250 institutes. 

The LHC generates data at the rate of around 25 Petabytes per year, and will continue for at least 10 years. This data is shared with all the participating scientists looking for discoveries to understand the fundamental laws of nature. These analyses need the combined resources of some 200 computer centres world-wide. CERN has chosen Grid technology to address the huge data storage and analysis challenge of LHC and tuns the WLCG (World-wide LHC COmputing Grid) for this purpose. CERN has prominently contributed, and contributes today in the context of the Framework Programmes to dozens of EC co-funded grid projects^[1] and coordinated the EGEE-III project that operated the largest multi-disciplinary grid infrastructure in the world.

The CERN charter, over half a century ago, enshrined that “… the results of its experimental and theoretical work shall be published or otherwise made generally available” and this has inspired the CERN Library to play a leading role in both European and worldwide Open Access movements, aiming to provide anyone with immediate and free access to the results of scientific research. In this context CERN is proposing SCOAP3, an innovative Open Access business model.

Leading Open Access vision and IT innovation come together at CERN through the development of Invenio, an Open Source digital library platform which powers the CERN Document Server, CERN institutional repository, and is the basis for INSPIRE, the next-generation High-Energy Physics discipline repository. The Invenio technology has also been transferred to dozens of other institutions in the world, from the sciences to the arts, from private foundations to political institutions.

Contact persons

• Tim Smith
• Lars Holm Nielsen
• Jose Benito Gonzalez Lopez
• Alex Ioannidis

FECYT, the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology, contributes to the strengthening of the Spanish science and technology system by adding value through the integration of scientific research and technological innovation activities, and cohesion between public and private institutions and bodies (government, science, industry, etc). The Foundation operates as a non-profit entity with functional autonomy.

Its mission is to provide flexible services to the Spanish science-technology-society system and to foster the international projection of Spanish research, in the European science arena in particular. Its strategic aims are: to promote activities of excellent technological research and development, to favour collaboration between national and international agents of science and technology system and to promote the social spreading of the scientific culture, as a tool of competitiveness and improvement of the life quality of citizens.

FECYT collaborates with the Ministry of Science and Innovation in the evaluation and monitoring of the R&D National Plan (2008-2011) as well as in the management of international programmes and projects. In this sense, even though FECYT is not a funding agency, it constitutes a powerful tool for the Ministry. Also, and due to its flexible structure, FECYT can provide the Ministry with professional science management teams, working groups, studies and policy reports that otherwise would be difficult to gather.

The role of the FECYT is to promote projects in the national and international arena that contribute to integrating the Ministry of Science and Innovation’s principal lines of action: university higher education; scientific research and innovation, scientific dissemination and scientific information management. It collaborates with the Ministry with the coordination of regional governments in S&T policy making. It operates and acts as an intermediary body for the Ministry with the relevant stakeholders in areas such as information management, scientific dissemination, R&D indicators, etc.

Contact persons

• Pilar Rico Castro
• Laura Valeria Bonora

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