On Tuesday 17th May, the scholarly communications community on Twitter erupted at the news that publishing giant Elsevier had acquired the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), a pre-print and publishing community focusing on social sciences and law. The acquisition seems designed to continue Elsevier’s move away from a content-driven business strategy towards one oriented on services and the monetisation of data and analytics, building on their purchase of Mendeley. Elsevier’s press release s...

Open Access was in the spotlight during the PASTEUR4OA (Open Access Policy Alignment Strategies for European Union Research) Final Conference “Green Light for Open Access”. The Conference was an event officially associated with the Dutch EU Presidency and attracted some 150 experts from research funding and research performing organisations, publishers, and national policy makers across Europe. It also attracted significant attention on Twitter (#greenlight4oa) with more than 1500 tweets. PASTEU...

Prof. Francesco Mondada, Mobile robots architecture & design, Laboratoire de Systèmes Robotiques (LSRO), Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL),  [caption id="attachment_896" align="alignright" width="178"] CC BY-SA 3.0 - Alain HerzogIn this extended guest post, Prof. Francesco Mondada describes a dilemma facing many researchers who use proprietary CAD software in their work but want to make their research results open: although education institutions, inclu...

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...

Christoph Lange and  Sahar Vahdati, Enterprise Information Systems (EIS), University of Bonn We’re happy to announce that the OpenAIRE Linked Open Data (LOD) Services are now available as a beta version at http://beta.lod.openaire.eu/. OpenAIRE already makes its data freely available for re-use via APIs. In line with its commitment to openness, OpenAIRE has been busy mapping OpenAIRE’s data onto suitable standard vocabularies in order to make OpenAIRE’s data available as Linked Open Data.  This ...

Converting open access repositories into functional evaluation platforms Bringing back quality control to the scientific communitySupported by OpenAIRE, Open Scholar has coordinated the development of the first Open Peer Review Module (OPRM) for open access repositories.Find out more about the features this module can bring to your repository:Quality control through enhanced evaluation: Common open access repositories already offer different, mostly quantitative, metrics like the number of visit...

Converting open access repositories into functional evaluation platforms Bringing back quality control to the scientific communitySupported by OpenAIRE, Open Scholar has coordinated the development of the first Open Peer Review Module (OPRM) for open access repositories.Find out more about the features this module can bring to your repository:Quality control through enhanced evaluation: Common open access repositories already offer different, mostly quantitative, metrics like the number of visit...

 As part of OpenAIRE2020, OpenEdition, in association with the Couperin consortium and the environmental science journal VertigO, is carrying out experiments in the areas of open peer review and open commentary. Although the experiments are still ongoing, we are here able to share an update on progress, along with some preliminary findings.The journal chosen for the experiments, VertigO, is a popular environmental sciences journal that receives a large number of submissions. In addition to the h...

The Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) and scientific information provider Elsevier have reached an agreement in principle  that continues to provide academics at Dutch universities with access to all Elsevier journals and allows them to publish through gold OA in a selection of Elsevier journals at no additional cost to the corresponding author.  The Dutch universities aim to make 30% of their researchers’ publications Open Access (OA) by 2018. For the first ti...

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...

The RDA 6th Plenary meeting recently took place in Paris, 23-25 September, with the theme "Enterprise Engagement with a focus on Research Data for Climate Change". It was a full week for OpenAIRE, with our Advisory Board meeting taking place in Paris on the 21st and a pre-plenary workshop with the theme “Data and computing infrastructures for open scholarship” organised by our Director Natalia Manola on the 22nd (full report to follow - watch this space!). We here present some highlights of the ...

The Slovenian Ministry of Education, Science and Sport hosted the conference on best practices of managing open access to publications and research data and on toll access to publications, with a view of enabling open science. The event took place on 1 October 2015 and was attended by approximately 130 participants in the hall as well as by 596 spectators of the video streaming. The presentations are available at event webpage and the video at Arnes Video portal. The welcome address was delivere...

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 f...

Following an invitation from Universidade do Minho, an update on the FP7 Post-Grant OA Pilot was delivered on July 28th 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 for...

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 Competiti...

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 sharing...

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 isn’...

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...