At its plenary assembly on Tuesday, 31 January 2017, the Rectors’ Conference of Swiss Higher Education Institutions, adopted a national Open Access Stategy. The strategy aims to provide public access to research publications via the Internet or via open databases as soon as possible. Currently, access to most research outputs is restricted by the terms and conditions of commercial publishers. Commissioned by the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI), the strategy will n...

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 November 29th 2016 the Swiss RDM Day took place at Rolex Learning Center, École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). The national workshop for 150 participants was jointly organised by OpenAIRE, the national project Data Life-Cycle Management (DLCM) and its partners (EPFL, ETH Zürich, HES-SO - HEG, University of Basel, University of Zurich, Université de Lausanne and SWITCH). The event provided insights into existing services like OpenAIRE and the upcoming national support services by D...

A two day workshop was held in Florence on November 14th -15th on  sharing, reuse, and reproducibility, curation of  research data. OpenAIRE-Italy (CNR-ISTI and NOAD) was strongly engaged in organizing the event, promoted and sponsored by RDA Europe in collaboration with the universities of Turin, Milan, Bologna, Parma and with the patronage of AISA - the Italian Association for the promotion of Open Science. In light of the FAIR principles and their recent adoption in the EC Guideline...

Over 350 researchers attended “Open Science in Horizon 2020”: the Serbia OpenAIRE National Workshop hosted by the University of Belgrade on November 8, 2016.   The event was opened by the Vice Rector of the University of Belgrade and the Deputy Minister of Science. The presentations covered the following topics: "OpenAIRE as a European infrastructure supporting Open Science", "OpenAIRE2020 in Serbia: an overview and successes" and a new Erasmus+ project  "BE-OPEN (Boosting Engagem...

On the November 4th 2016 the Portuguese OpenAIRE national workshop was held in Coimbra, Portugal, at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research of the University of Coimbra. The workshop was focused on the Open Access and Open Data Horizon 2020 requirements but also aimed to have a more comprehensive view of Open Science. With the title "Open Science and the Funders' Requirements: Open Access and Open Data in H2020", this half-day workshop had four main presentations from Stephen Curry, Imperi...

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...

On the November 16th 2016 a national workshop was held in Odense, Denmark at the University of Southern Denmark. The workshop opened with the perspective of recent developments in the area of data management in Europe in general and Denmark in particular with focus on Horizon 2020. One of the main developments in Denmark recently is the forming of the National Forum for Research Data Management with participants from all 8 Danish universities, The Royal Library, The State Library and the Nationa...

The OpenAIRE National Workshop for Austria took place during the International Open Access Week, on the 25th of October. It was designed as an information sharing event for researchers who take part in FP7 and H2020 Projects, research administration services and other interested services. It was organized by OpenAire NOAD, Austria and the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), which is the Austrian NCP for the European Commission and also one of the most important funders for science in Austr...

During Open Access Week FECYT took part of an event in Madrid organized by REBIUN, the network of university libraries in Spain, two of the major library consortia CSUC (Catalonia) and Madroño (Madrid) and FECYT itself. The event gathered the two major existing initiatives nowadays related to research data management and research data repositories in university libraries in Spain and besides that, FECYT also show the audience the results of the study on the level of compliance of the open access...

The Library of the University of Latvia and National Open Access Desk - Latvia participated in Open Access Week 2016 by organising several activities:The workshop „Research Data Management and Open Science: Challenges and Opportunities for Latvia” as pre-event, on October 13. The workshop was given by Iryna Kuchma, EIFL-OA Programme Manager. Click HERE to view the recording of this workshop.One of the main events was the conference „Research of the University of Latvia and e-resources”. The...

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 ...