OpenAIRE Launch Event Proceedings
14 December 2010
Below you can find a narration of the day speeches/presentations and discussions.
Opening Session
Prof. Paul Van Cauwenberge, Rector of Ghent University, gave a welcoming speech presenting the University of Ghent, its library and its connection to Open Access [
UGhent_Rector@OpenAIRE].
Vice President of the European Commission Neelie Kroes, responsible for Digital Agenda, addressed OpenAIRE stessing the need for Open Access and the challenges that we need to cope with and overcome [ Neelie_Kroes@OpenAIRE].
Dr. Jean Moulin, representing Mrs. Sabine Laruelle, Belgian Minister of Science Policy, stressed the importance of a collaborative approach in the aim of opening up access to new knowledge, produced with public funds, to all scientific and research communities, the education sector, industry, and all interested parties, including setting up the ICT and organisational infrastructures this objective requires. This evolution is at the very heart of the knowledge triangle – Research, Education, Innovation. Belgium is committed to the policy of open access to scientific publications. Research programmes financed by the Belgian Federal authority are planning measures to ensure open access to results. For these policies, the OpenAIRE project is an extremely valuable and necessary support instrument.[
OpenAIRE_Speech Laruelle_E]
Dr. Yannis Ioannidis (Professor of Informatics & Telecommunications, University of Athens, Greece) gave a strategic overview of OpenAIRE [ OpenAIRE Overall Presentation], stressing its goals and functionalities. Together with Neelie Kroes they "virtually" launched the OpenAIRE portal services highlighting the active participation, OA commitment and enthusiasm of 27 EC member states.
Dr. John Willinsky (Professor of Education and Director of Public Knowledge Project, Stanford University) in his keynote speech discussed the OpenAIRE project benefits for the research community and public at large. He used arguments from the area of public philosophy, legal history and economics.
Looking from the perspective of public philosophy and aiming at the promotion of ideas, the OpenAIRE project increases the accessibility and improves the quality of knowledge. The accessibility of knowledge improves the quality of knowledge on Internet, in the public sphere and on every student's desk. This new quality of knowledge could be compared with an air quality largely debated in other fora. Availability of knowledge – as free as the air – can be considered from the human rights perspective as a response to the human right to know what is already known and what is publicly funded. It brings a second chance for participatory, cooperative and inclusive enlightenment and has a public reason – new ways to educate the students and the public at large, supporting access to knowledge in a much broader scope. In this sense, open access, open data and open educational resources form a new trinity for a new englightenment.
In the legal history perspective – we have just celebrated the 300th anniversary of The Statute of Anne – generally considered as the first fully-fledged copyright statute. Its longer title was An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, which reminds us about the origins of the copyright acts – to protect the rights of people to know. And this original meaning should be emphasized in the current copyright debates.
In economic perspective the OpenAIRE project is a transition because it is still about the peer reviewed research articles or final manuscripts to be deposited, not the final published versions of the articles. Scholarly societies and scholarly publishers working in a fragile knowledge economy need to think radically and futuristic. In particular, we need to rethink current business practices in knowledge dissemination and come up with economic models on how to reallocate the resources which are already available in the scholarly communication system. We already have good results. According to the results of the Public Knowledge Project survey of 7,500 journals using the Open Journal System software, 85% of these journals are open access journals. The OpenAIRE project is built on existing infrastructures, using technical know how and excellence, is co-owned by the EU member states and promotes open access policies.
Session 1: The Challenge of Open Access
Dr. Norbert Lossau (Director of the State and University Library of Göttingen) presented the Open Access Vision on the European Level and how this is affected by the different current or emerging infrastructures [ Vision on European Level Open Access Infrastructure].
Dr. Celina Ramjoué, substituting Gilles Laroche (Head of Governance & Ethics Unit, DG Research, European Commission), stressed how OpenAIRE is seen as one of the EC's flagship programmes and gave an overview of the Open Access aspects in the European Context [ EC_Policies@OpenAIRE].
Dr. Kostas Glynos chaired the panel of funding agencies of Dr. Luis Magalhães (President of the Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC), Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education, Portugal), Dr. Ron Dekker (Director of The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)) and Prof. Gábor B. Makara (Research Professor, Institute of Experimental Medicine Budapest; former President of the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund) participated in the Panel of Funding agencies chaired by Dr. Kostas Glinos (Head of GEANT and eInfrastructures Unit, DG INFSO, European Commission).
The panel of funding agencies revolved around the question, what kind of infrastructures are needed to support funders' open access policies and how these might be extended to research data. Moreover, the question of synergies between local and European policies and infrastructures was addressed, that is how these infrastructures might support the uptake of funders' policies.
In Portugal there is a federation of distributed repositories and a national platform for HEIs to host their repositories. The costs are very low and NREN capacities are used to run these services. There is a decentralized governance (controlled by the institutions) and this platform is integrated with other countries – Brazil is the first partner country. The federated platform allows improved search and indexing tools, easy linkage to other documents, citations, collaborative research results, interoperability and long term preservation. There are programmes to educate the users of the platform and to encourage the adoption of open access mandates. The reason to run these programmes is to improve financial efficiency in higher education and science.
The Hungarian Scientific Research Fund has adopted an open access policy, but it is not enough to require, the policy should be enforced with some disciplinary measures (e.g. linking the reporting systems of grant agencies with open access repositories and without a deposition of full text paper the grant report is not accepted). Open access infrastructure has to be embedded into the workflows of the researchers. They will not specifically look for open access publications, they will look for publications and open access research literature should be one click away from the general search engines.
The public availability of the research results is a part of the mission of the Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) in the Netherlands. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, it is possible to use existing infrastructure: publishers with quality control, distribution and archiving, as well as new business models. Open access publication is a requirement in the NWO and funding is available to cover the article processing charges and to support new open access journals. Licensing agreements with publishers are recommended to avoid the copyright transfers. The OpenAIRE project can provide the standards to the community and one click away results of funded research.
The existing infrastructures in the countries can be extended to link publications and research data. There are several models for data deposition and disciplinary approaches are important. Collaborative promotion of open access to data advantages is needed – e.g. data sets associated with publications increase citations, there are societal benefits when public libraries could have a role to open up information for society and small and medium size enterprises stimulating innovations. We need an infrastructure to deposit data. Open access to data will be a longer process than open access to research publications. We still lack clear understanding of the ownership of data. It would be good if scientists, host institution and funders could co-own the data and this would be legally fixed. A question of peer reviewing the research data will occur – is this also a responsibility of the journal editors? It is also important that the professionals deal with data curation – e.g. librarians and information scientists check the metadata quality and provide support services for researchers willing to deposit their data. Role models are important and senior scientists should take up this role.
In conclusion, the panel of the funding agencies highlighted a need for decentralized governance, national federations and European level federation, interoperability and standards and top-down policies plus promotion and incentives for scientists.
Session 2: OpenAIRE Technology and Support of EC Open Access Policies
Dr. Donatella Castelli (OpenAIRE Technical Director, CNR-ISTI) presented a more detailed view of the technical choices and aspects of the OpenAIRE infrastructure [ OpenAIRE Technical Infrastructure], followed by a video/demo of the functionalities of the portal and its services.
Four of the National Open Access Desks presented the current and emerging OA initiatives and infrastructures in their countries, and spoke of how OpenAIRE assists them in their national efforts: Gyongyi Karacsony, University of Debrecen for Hungary [ OpenAIRE East (Hungary)], Mikael K. Elbæk, Technical University of Denmark [ OpenAIRE North (Denmark)], Marnix van Berchum, Utrecht University [ OpenAIRE West (Netherlands)] and Alicia López Medina & Izaskun Lacuna, FECYT [ OpenAIRE Souht (Spain)].
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Finally, the panel on the future of OpenAIRE (Dr. Gregor Hagedorn - Research Scientist, Julius Kühn-Institute, Dr. Frederick Friend - Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL, Dr. Jean-Claude Guedon - Professor of Comparative Literature at the Université de Montréal, Dr. John Willinsky - Professor of Education, Stanford University, Dr. Carlos Morais Pires - Project Officer, DG INFSO, European Commission, chair: Astrid van Wesenbeeck, Executive Director of SPARC Europe) outlined that this network of repositories can contribute in significant ways to the European Research Area (ERA), particularly in helping structure it. The network of repositories could even make the ERA move in the direction of a strong and qualitatively high European Research Territory.
With regard to a more practical research level the panel discussed the need of researchers to access and work with all kinds of research materials and results in their own environment. It was considered highly important not just to deposit the final results of research in open access repositories, but to make this content available for re-use and processing, complemented by services that allow innovative and more efficient research.
It was well clarified and underpinned that research infrastructures of the future have to support the whole cycle of research and all workflows involved. Moreover the question of using clear licensing for use/reuse, like Creative Commons share-alike licenses, was seen as an important issue that would not be solved with green Open Access alone. As researchers are in a weak position vis-a-vis publishers it was suggested that the EC should mandate that a transfer of copyright to publishers is no longer acceptable.
The panel underpinned as well the need for a change in the current research evaluation system. Key elements of research evaluation are in the hands of commercial databases and publishers, such as the Impact Factor and other metrics based on Web of Science and Scopus. The panel argued for a revised reputation management as part of the current transitions in scholarly communication. In particular, there was an expressed need for a change in the approach of the scientific evaluation and bibliometrics, as well as to integrate usage data and new metrics.
Finally, the panel pointed out that action is needed to secure open access to works and research materials for the long term.
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