Erasmus University Rotterdam Joins OpenAIRE: A Conversation with Maria Constantin

Can you please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your background and expertise?

After completing my PhD in Plant Pathology, at the University of Amsterdam, I worked as a scientific editor for the Elsevier journal Data in Brief. In this role I realized, wanted to be back in the academic environment and help researchers with their publishing endeavour. Currently, I am working as an Open Access Officer at Erasmus University Rotterdam, and I lead the Diamond Open Access Expertise Centre which consists of a small team of various publishing experts across the Netherlands.

Could you share some of the current projects or initiatives you're involved in related to Open Science?

My work at Diamond Open Access Expertise Centre keeps me quite busy. This digital hub is a national capacity centre which collaborates internationally with the European Diamond Capacity Hub and nationally with the consortium of Dutch libraries. Our work consists of promoting, advocating, and creating resources and events for and with the Diamond OA community both nationally and institutionally. Recently, my colleague Chiara Livio from Utrecht University developed in collaboration with Till Bey from SURF an interactive dashboard which gives you an overview of all the Diamond Open Access journals in the Netherlands. The dashboard is open source so everyone is welcome to use it and adapt it to showcase their own journals in a country if they want to. 

Is there a particular aspect of Open Science that resonates with you personally? Could you tell us about it?

I strongly believe that creating and sharing knowledge is what drives humanity forward. Creating something without disseminating it is useless. As a researcher, I was on "the creating side," and now my mission is to make knowledge available to everyone. This can only be truly achieved through a Diamond Open Access model. While the Open Access movement is good in principle, in practice, only a small part of the world is taking part in this due to the high publication costs associated with it gold open access. If we want truly equitable access, Diamond OA is the only way forward.

How do you see Open Science evolving in the next decade, and what role do you hope to play in that evolution?

I think that peer-review-curate publication platforms (such as MetaROR), which operate under a Diamond OA model, are the future. Why wait to publish your work after peer-review? Just publish your article and data first, and your work is there for scrutiny and further curation by a journal (if wanted). At EUR, I am involved in promoting the peer-review-curate model with our researchers and taking part of the national project on boosting this model within the Netherlands . This project was awarded this year by openscience.nl and I am very excited to take part in it. 

What advice would you give to someone who is just starting to explore the world of Open Science?

Find the support staff in your organization who knows how to do Open Science (open access, open data, software etc.). They can provide you with a quick overview of what is most important for you to know, and this will save you a lot of time down the line.

Outside of your work in Open Science, what are some of your personal interests or hobbies?

I love gardening and houseplants. It is a good way to keep me grounded and I love to see seedlings emerge. It is addictive.Maria Constantin's perspective highlights both the opportunities and the ongoing challenges in making Open Science a reality in practice. From supporting Diamond Open Access communities to promoting new publication models, her work reflects a broader shift towards more equitable and transparent ways of sharing research. 

As Erasmus University Rotterdam joins the OpenAIRE network, we look forward to continued exchange and collaboration around these approaches, and to the contributions they will bring to the community.