The workshop was held at the University of Helsinki at the end of August. The event was designed to paint a broad picture of the current scene of Open Science starting from the European level down to local university level developments. The focus was clearly on infrastructures supporting the goals of Open Science but there was also a strong emphasis on networking between all participants. This aspect was facilitated by thematic discussion groups during the lunch. The workshop gathered some sixty...

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 ...

On the 25th of February 2016, the Council of ministers of the Republic of Cyprus, approved the adoption of the National policy for Open Access in Cyprus. The document's approval was the outcome of a tremendous collaboration between the different stakeholders involved in the Working Group for Open Access (consisting of the NPR for OA, local Academic institutions and national funders), coordinated by the OPENAIRE2020 Cyprus NOAD (University of Cyprus Library) and highly supported by the coord...

In October 2015, the Ministry of Science and Higher Education (MNiSW) in Poland issued a document that reflects the Polish response to the European Commission's recommendation of July 17, 2012, on access to and preservation of scientific information. The published document, entitled „Directions of the development of open access to research publications and research results in Poland”, has been prepared by an expert group that had been working under the auspices of the Mi...

Blogpost by Michał Starczewski and Lidia Stępińska-Ustasiak   Report by  Wojciech Fenrich, Tomasz Lewandowski, Krzysztof Siewicz, Michał Starczewski, Lidia Stępińska-Ustasiak, and Jakub Szprot (editor). The Open Science Platform (ICM, University of Warsaw) has recently published a report “Open Access and research institutions”. The focus of the report is on the basic issues related to open access from the perspective of research institutions. Some more sophisticated and technical aspec...

OpenAIRE welcomes the adoption of the Guidelines for Open Access to Research Results, Research Council of Lithuania The Research Council of Lithuania adopted Guidelines for Open Access to Research Results (resource in Lithuanian) on 29 February 2016. The Guidelines include open access (OA) and open research data policy that are fully aligned with the Horizon 2020 (H2020) OA mandate and Open Research Data Pilot, and the July 2012 European Commission recommendations on access to and...

This year, Open Knowledge Belgium picked the beautiful city of Antwerp as the place to be for all open knowledge, open source and open data enthusiasts. The variety of speakers at the Open Belgium Conference clearly mirrors the mission of Open Knowledge Belgium: opening up knowledge in Belgium trough community driven ways connecting four main actors: community, researchers, governments and industries. The conference consisted of a number of sessions with a wide variety of topics ranging from ope...

On January 28, the Latvian University Library received the Recognition award of the Latvian Open Technology Association (LATA) at the conference "Open technology and smart solutions" . The LATA conference is about sharing knowledge, and for discussing smart technologies that emphasise security, privacy, data storage and ICT management aspects. OpenAIRE wants to congratulate the Latvian University Library with this accomplishment!

At the beginning of 2015 an Austria-wide survey was conducted, directed at the academic personnel of 24 universities and research institutions affiliated with the e-infrastructures Austria project. This survey aimed to gather information about how Austrian researchers deal with their data on an institutional, as well as a disciplinary level. This study is the first attempt on a national level in Austria to find out how academics work with data and how institutions and disciplines influence data ...

The conference “Open Science - the 21th century benefits for researchers” took place during the annual International Open Access week. This conference, which had financial support provided by the European Union`s FP7 program`s project FOSTER, was organized by three institutions – the National Library of Latvia, the University of Latvia and Technical Riga University. The conference was attended by more than hundred scientists and research managers, creaters of research policie...

An OpenAIRE Day and Workshop will take place in Dublin on the 27th of November 2015. This day is being sponsored by the RIAN Board and organised by the RIAN Technical & Communications Group. Who should attend?Repository Managers, Librarians, Data Managers & FundersWhy you should attend?Understand funder perspectives.Learn how to comply with funder mandates for H2020 and OpenAIRE.Provide the context for open access publications in the research environment.Share best practice about metadat...

Open-Access-Tage 2015 (Open Access Days 2015) took place 7-8 September in Zurich, Switzerland. The conference highlighted that Open Access (OA) and Open Science (OS) now reach a multitude of stakeholders, though each are impacted at different levels and in various forms. This diversity of knowledge and requirements increasingly requires information exchange and coordination. In Switzerland, there is a proliferation of central stakeholders: the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innova...

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...

The Government of the Republic of Slovenia has adopted the National strategy of open access to scientific publications and research data in Slovenia 2015-2020 on 3 September 2015. The Slovenian and English versions are available at the Ministry web page. OpenAIRE and PASTEUR4OA , together with project partner EIFL, provided a joint submission to support the National strategy during the public consultation process. The National Strategy provides a good-practice example of a fully aligne...

Transition to Open Access in Poland has been happening for some time. Over 20 scientific institutions have repositories, some of them implemented OA policies, near 950 journals are available freely on the internet. But the transition results solely from bottom-up initiatives. The report “Open Science in Poland 2014. A Diagnosis” analyses the strengths and limitations of such a model.The aim of the report is to present a comprehensive overview of the current state of openness in Polish science. T...

  Netherlands national Open Access website renewed The Netherlands national website on open access has been completely revamped. It now has a new, up-to-date look and is more interactive. www.openaccess.nl/en provides information in both Dutch and English about key open access developments in the Netherlands. The site also presents general up-to-date information on open access, a subject that is important for scholarship at home and abroad. Here are the most important changes:All informatio...

On June 22, 2015, a one­day training session in Research Data Management (RDM) was organized in Warsaw by the Open Science Platform (ICM, University of Warsaw), ­ the Polish OpenAIRE2020 NOAD. The session was run by Kevin Ashley, director of the Digital Curation Centre (UK). Thirty participants from different parts of Poland attended the workshop. The majority of them were active researchers ­ mostly PhD students and young researchers ­ and librarians and...

The Flemish Interuniversity Council, VLIR, organized a Foster workshop on Open Science and Research Data Management. The conference lived up to its name covering a wide variety of topics on Open Data and Data Management, ranging from policies and legal aspects to case studies, researcher’s experiences and useful applications.After a general introduction, in which Stefanie Van der Burght, Ghent University, underlined the importance of data management in a research environment and how this influen...

On the 9th and 10th of march 2015, a training session on research data took place in Lyon, at the National school for librarians. The session was chaired by Monique Joly, head of the INSA Lyon library (School of Engineering) and of Couperin’s department services and forecasting studies. Around 20 librarians gathered to learn or share their experience on research data curation.The goal of this continuing training session for librarians was to define the challenges of the preservation, the sharing...