Why aren’t articles on arXiv or any other open access repository formally credited as publications? What is it exactly that separates open access repositories from publishers? The simple answer is that publications in journals come with an amorphous quality indicator associated with the journal’s perceived prestige. Articles posted on a repository on the other hand, are considered to be “provided at the reader’s own risk”, as they are not accompanied by any measurable guarantee of their scientif...

The identification of Gold Open Access with the payment of Article Processing Charges (APCs) is a widespread misunderstanding that has often led this alternative route for OA implementation to be dismissed as commercial publisher-friendly and prone to double dipping. However, Gold OA means publishing in any Open Access journal, and it's a well-known fact that over two thirds of the OA journals hosted in the DOAJ charge no APCs to their authors. This is the reason why when discussing the way the ...

Following an invitation from Universidade do Minho, an update on the FP7 Post-Grant OA Pilot was delivered on July 28 th at the monthly coordination meeting for the OpenAIRE NOADS in the South Region, including Portugal, Spain, Italy, Malta, Greece, Cyprus and Turkey. This included a short presentation and a 30 mins Q&A session where different aspects of the initiative were discussed with the NOAD representatives. Lists of eligible FP7 projects were shared prior to the event with the NOADs f...

The future development of the European Research Area (ERA) was discussed at the conference A new start for Europe: opening up to an ERA of innovation  that was attended by more than 500 participants. The first day was dedicated to the Open Science, and the second day to the world-class research and innovation ecosystem for Europe and to the improvement of its framework conditions. In this report we present the current and planned activities of the European Commission on Open Science. The Competi...

Last week I attended the OAI9 conference in Geneva . Great weather, great discussions and a great programme. The Thurs afternoon session on “Quality Assurance” (read: peer review) was of particular interest for me. Since I actually took notes (something I usually don't), I thought I'd give them a bit more form and put them to use here. Enjoy. PLOS First up, Damian Pattinson from PLOS discussed “Managing Peer Review at Scale” with PLOS One. Scale is certainly correct – PLOS One publishes over 600...

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 shari...

Gathering again at the bi-yearly event in Geneva, a diverse and yes, innovative, programme was presented. Note: remove CERN from the title, now known as the 'Geneva Workshop on Innovation in Scholarly Communication'. All slides and video of the presentations are available online . https://www.flickr.com/photos/130998664@N02/18916757805/in/pool-openaire/ Main take-away's: Make it efficient for the researcher but also to explore their ongoing responsibilities in an open science arena OA altruism i...

Over 100 participants from 10 countries attended the international conference “Open Research Data: Implications for Science and Society” which took place in Warsaw on May 28-29, 2015. The conference was organized by the Open Science Platform – part of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling at the University of Warsaw (ICM UW) – which also functions as the Polish OpenAIRE 2020 National Open Access Desk. The audience of the conference was very mixed, including re...

Approximately 120 participants attended the event entitled Practical aspects of publishing in open access: a seminar for researchers and librarians , which took place in Ljubljana, Slovenia, at the premises of the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport on 20 May 2015. The event was jointly organized by the Ministry and three libraries (the National and University Library, the Central Technological Library of the University of Ljubljana, the University of Maribor Library) and was live streamed ...

On May 6, the The Hague Declaration on Knowledge Discovery in the Digital Age was officially launched by LIBER at the Science Europe offices in Brussels. [caption id="attachment_248" align="alignright" width="215"] Paul Ayris, Lars Björnshauge, Caroline Sutton, Jean-François Dechamp and Kristiina Hormia-Poutanen Coinciding with the launch of the Digital Single Market strategy by the European Commission, LIBER’s Paul Ayris and Susan Reilly did not neglect to stress the fact that this declaration ...

Co-hosted by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) on April 14-16, 2015, the conference “Connecting research results, bridging communities, opening scholarship”  , held in Porto, offered a thought-provoking programme with dynamic speakers from around the world to discuss the opportunities and challenges for libraries in a world of open science and open content, provided a valuable opportunity for parti...

OpenAIRE supports OA infrastructure in Europe and beyond, to help realize Open Science for the benefit of society, innovation and industry. OpenAIRE2020, the current project phase, is investigating a full complement of scholarly communication building blocks, including research data management support, gold open access, usage statistics, Linked Open Data, a publication broker and global interoperability. As part of this effort, Göttingen State and University Library , in partnership with COUPERI...

Last January 19th initiated the Austrian national survey regarding research data. This survey is performed within the scope of e-Infrastructures Austria, which is a project sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy (BMWFW). Within this context, this is the first time a nation wide survey regarding research data is performed in Austria. Participants include all scientists and researchers from all participating project partners.   Dr. Christian Gumpenberger from the Librar...

Over 50 partners and 100 attendees gathered at the end of January in Athens. The event was more a conference, than a kick-off, here are the top 10 take-aways: 1. OpenAIRE2020 is 3-5 projects in one OpenAIRE2020 has a grand vision: building on previous iterations, it is an infrastructure which now supports the OA mandate of the EC via a network of repositories, OA journals and information systems (CRIS). The project also includes a full complement of scholarly communication building blocks: resea...