How Greek academic libraries support scholarly communication
In focus: The Greek academic library community was recently enhanced with an Open Science service supported by HEAL-Link. The newly established "Scholarly Communication Unit" aims to provide librarians with information about Open Access (OA) and scholarly communication, such as best practices on research data, scholarly metrics and peer review. It is also assigned to represent the consortium in international partnerships and projects. The Scholarly Communication Unit operates in the University of Patras, a fundamental member of HEAL-Link.
HEAL-Link is the national academic libraries consortium serving as the link amongst academic libraries in Greece and supporting their needs in a homogenized and cost-effective manner. HEAL-link participates in OpenAIRE and shares responsibilities with ATHENA Research & Innovation Center in the context of the Greek NOAD activities.
Specifics: The Scholarly Communication Unit supports different aspects of scholarly publishing. It monitors the progress of the HEAL-Link Open Access programmes, such as OA agreements with scientific publishers, and also reports on the Greek effect in trending topics, such as in COVID-19 research. Recently, the COVID-19 Dataset of Global Research of the database Dimensions was exploited to highlight COVID-19 publications of Greek researchers.
Furthermore, the Unit is committed to forward in the national research environment all relevant tools and innovations that will assist the Greek researchers to expose their work in an open and transparent way. Hence, it diffuses information about new advancements in scholarly publishing and facilitates better adoption by performing translations of vital Open Science resources in native language. A recent example is the Greek translation of the Open Research Europe (ORE) guidelines. ORE is the new European Commission platform for the open peer review and publication of research outputs funded by Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe frameworks.
OA in 2020: The first Open Access report -covering the months January to September 2020-was based on data obtained from the cooperating publishers, after they were checked, normalized and enriched. In total, during the first nine months of 2020, HEAL-Link supported the publication of 261 articles in 10 publishers with three types of support, namely APC waivers, discount and membership in OA programs. In short, the majority of these were article submissions in STEM journals, more than 70% were published on pure gold journals and the preferred Creative Commons license was CC-BY (85%). The report is dynamic and therefore the viewers can navigate themselves across various indicators. For the best possible administration of the OA agreements, the Unit aims to provide quarterly reports starting from 2021, as well as complement ATHENA's efforts in organizing webinars for librarians for the effective promotion of Open Access in the academic environment. An updated report with data concluding 2020 and retrospectively looking at 2019 is expected at the end of March. The initial report is available at https://scholarly.heal-link.gr/monitoring/oaheal/.
Blogpost by: Athanasia Salamoura, HEAL-Link Scholarly Communication Unit
edited by: Elli Papadopoulou, ATHENA Research & Innovation Center
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