The inaugural session reflected on the Monitor’s first year, explored its key features, and addressed data quality challenges, particularly in ensuringorganizational consistency. Through live demonstrations and discussions, the session set the tone for the series: a collaborative effort to deepen the Monitor’s role in advancing Open Access in Ireland.

For those who could not attend, therecording and slides are available. Whether you are new to the Monitor or already familiar with it, we hope you will join us at the next session onJanuary 23, 2025.

Looking Back: Building the Foundation

Since its launch inMarch 2024, the National Open Access Monitor has focused on providing a practical platform to support Open Science and decision-making. Including

• Delivering tailored dashboards to meet the needs of the Irish research community.

• Enhancing data quality throughsystematic processes, including text mining, deduplication, and metadata validation.

• Encouraging adoption by integrating features, functionalities, and documentation to fit seamlessly into organizational workflows. (e.g., the Monitoruser actions)

Steps taken to shape the Monitor into a resource that addresses both the needs of its users and the challenges of Open Access tracking.

 Exploring the Monitor’s Features

The session included a walkthrough of the Monitor’sfive dashboards: the National, for Research Funding Organisations (RFOs), Research Performing Organisations (RPOs), Institutional Repositories and Researchers. Attendees saw how these dashboards answer key questions for stakeholders and explored their filtering, embedding, browsing, and validation functionalities.  The live demonstrations highlighted the practical workflows within the dashboards. 

 Tackling Data Quality with OpenOrgs

Data quality emerged as a central theme during the session, with a focus onOpenOrgs, a tool addressing the challenge of organizational disambiguation. Research organizations often appear under multiple names or identifiers, complicating analysis and reporting. OpenOrgs bridges this gap by semi-automatically (automation + curation)

• Identifying and consolidating duplicate entries to ensure consistency.

• Clarifying relationships between parent and child organizations, such as universities and their departments.

• Providing dashboard managers with tools to curate and refine organizational data.

The session included a live demonstration of OpenOrgs, showing its potential to reduce administrative burdens and deliver accurate, actionable insights. Questions during the demo centered on usability, metadata prioritization, and how the Monitor reflects these results transparently in dashboards. Without robust data quality, consistent and reliable insights are impossible—a key point that will be revisited in the next session.

What’s Next: Data Quality and AI Insights

The second session in theOpen Insights Series will take place onJanuary 23, 2025, at 12:00 GMT. This session will build on the themes of data quality and technology, diving into:

• Data Quality Practices: Updates on improving metadata consistency, deduplication processes, and accuracy.

• AI and Text Mining: How these advanced tools are helping the Monitor extract meaningful patterns and identify trends in Open Access.

• Interactive Q&A: An opportunity to connect with the data quality team and address specific challenges.

Why Your Voice Matters

TheOpen Insights Series is about fostering collaboration and building a shared understanding of how the Monitor can advance Open Science in Ireland. Your participation helps shape the conversation, ensuring these tools meet the diverse needs of policymakers, institutions, and researchers.

From transparency to transformation, how your voice shapes the future of science, and why Open Science Fair (OSFair) 2025 is the place to start. Learn all the details!

OpenAIRE and Alien Intelligence are launching a 12-week Open Science hackathon focusing on AI, starting June 2, with submissions due August 20. Whether you're a researcher chasing a question, a developer building the next tool, or an analyst turning data into evidence, there's a track for you.

On December 10–11, 2024, the Hellenic Open Science Initiative (HOSI) hosted the 3rd Open Science Symposium at the National Center for Natural Sciences Research “Demokritos” in Athens. Dive into!

Read the recap from the second session of the Open Insights Series highlighted the National Open Access Monitor's data quality initiatives! Discussions emphasized the OpenAIRE Graph's foundational role and the transformative impact of text mining for Research Funding Organisations. Learn more details!

On January 23, 2025, the Pattern Remake Workshop brought together researchers, facilitators, and citizen scientists to discuss emerging trends in Open & Responsible Research and Innovation. Held in a hybrid format, it connected participants across Europe, with in-person sessions at Politecnico di Milano.

The FAIRFEST event, a key gathering for the Open Science community, recently hosted a presentation on theResearch Discovery Graph (RDGraph) and the role of Persistent Identifiers (PIDs). The session, led by Carole Goble and over 40 experts, highlighted how RDGraph—an integral part of the OpenAIRE Graph—enhances research discovery and interoperability within theEuropean Open Science Cloud (EOSC).

From bold principles to real-world change: at the Open Science Fair 2025 in Geneva, the workshop “Collaborative Pathways to Responsible Research Assessment via Open Infrastructures” tackled the pressing question of how to truly reform research assessment. The global debate has moved beyond why change is needed; now it’s about how to build the infrastructures, both technical and social, that can turn vision into practice.

A new initiative has been launched to tackle open source and open science challenges with community-driven solutions. TheOpen Innovation Sprints are being coordinated byNumFOCUS, theResearch Software Alliance(ReSA), andOpen Source Collective, with support fromOpenAIRE and other organizations. Keep reading and learn all the details!

OpenAIRE, as part of the EVERSE project, is delighted to invite you to two key events happening this February. Keep reading for more details!

Get ready to dive into the most pressing debates, innovative sessions, and emerging trends that will define OSFair 2025. Explore all the details, stay ahead and discover what’s driving the next era of Open Science. Read the full agenda before starting to pack for your OSFair journey!

As part of the Open Insights series, this session invited the community to reflect on progress made in the first phase of the Irish National Open Access Monitor, share practical feedback, and look ahead. Far from a closing event, the session marked an inflection point: a shared space to take stock and to help shape what comes next.

 At this year’s Open Science Conference 2025 in Hamburg, OpenAIRE played a key role in exploring how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming research practices and infrastructures. Read on about our contributions.

Reflections from Pisa on Open Science, assessment reform, and the future shaped by GraspOS

On 12–13 November 2025, around 140 people—some onsite at the CNR headquarters in Pisa, others joining online—gathered for Opening Research Assessment, the final conference of the GraspOS project. The event marked the end of three years of work on rethinking how Europe evaluates research—and the beginning of a broader movement to make assessment more transparent, humane, and aligned with Open Science.

From the start, the tone was set by a simple truth: we are living in a research world where meaning often gets lost, either in the silences of the past or in the overload of the present.

Newton, whose unpublished notes remained hidden for years because dissemination was slow and expensive, would probably struggle in today’s environment for opposite reasons. Instead of ideas locked in drawers, we have ideas buried under a flood of publications, metrics, and dashboards. Today, the situation is inverted compared to a decade ago. Research publications are abundant, but the final goal of these productions are career and metric-oriented. Yet the very abundance generates noise. Groundbreaking work can drown in a sea of papers. The silence of the past has become the overload of the present. And so, the conference opened with a question that shaped the entire discussion: what kind of research assessment system helps us find meaning rather than noise?

GraspOS and a shared infrastructure for the future

Supporting Open Science–aligned reforms and Europe’s future EOSC ecosystem

Rather than ending with a report, GraspOS has created a solid, reusable foundation for responsible research assessment. Its work produced a federated and open assessment infrastructure; a catalogue of contextualised indicators; narrative CV templates co-designed with research institutions; pilots across universities, funders, and national initiatives; and practical guidelines for implementing Open Science–aligned reforms.

These resources now form a shared toolbox for researchers, RPOs, RFOs, national services, and research infrastructures, offering a roadmap for those navigating CoARA commitments and preparing to align with future EOSC standards. GraspOS leaves not a legacy but a living infrastructure—one designed to grow with the community.

Open Science as the lens that reveals real contributions

Why open infrastructures matter in today’s research assessment ecosystem

In her talk, Giulia Malaguarnera explored the shift from noise to clarity. 
Traditional evaluation systems rely heavily on proprietary databases and citation metrics originally designed for bibliometrics—not for shaping careers or guiding funding decisions. Used mechanically, these metrics have contributed to a culture of hyper-production, ranking pressure, and burnout.

Open infrastructures offer a different path. 
The OpenAIRE Graph, enriched through ORCID, ROR, and community-driven contributions, provides transparent and reproducible metadata that make diverse research practices visible—data stewardship, software development, interdisciplinary collaborations, community engagement, early dissemination. OpenCitations, as mentioned by Silvio Peroni, alongside the OpenAIRE Graph, represents an essential alternative to proprietary citation databases, helping prevent misuse of citation indicators and offering a more open foundation for analysis.

Together, they create an ecosystem where evaluation is grounded in openness and context, not in opaque metrics or closed systems.

OpenAIRE MONITOR complements this by offering institutions and funders a way to follow their Open Science strategies using verifiable evidence, while MyResearchFolio introduces narrative elements that help researchers explain the reasoning, evolution, and impact behind their work—without sacrificing structure or comparability.

What the community asked for: clarity, guidance, and trustworthy foundations

How institutions navigate the shift toward more responsible assessment

Participants from Research Performing and Funding Organisations (RPOs and RFOs) across Europe converged around a similar set of challenges. They want to embrace responsible research assessment, but need guidance on fair narrative CVs, on how to contextualise indicators, and on how to build internal workflows aligned with CoARA commitments.

When real MyResearchFolio profiles were shown—connected to ORCID and the OpenAIRE Graph—the response was immediate. Institutions saw a path to adopting narrative CVs in a way that is structured, interoperable, and meaningful.

Similarly, OpenAIRE MONITOR attracted the audience’s interest for its capacity to track Open Access and Open Science practices using open, reproducible data—avoiding the biases of proprietary sources and supporting evidence-based policy.One participant distilled the mood: “We don’t need more indicators. We need indicators we can trust and understand.”

A shared lesson: context is the new currency of evaluation

Why responsible research assessment depends on openness, interoperability, and co-creation

By the end of the event, an important consensus had taken shape: responsible assessment is neither metric-free nor metric-led—it is context-led. 
Indicators without interpretation mislead. Narrative alone is insufficient. 
Interoperability—between identifiers, metadata sources, infrastructures—is essential to ensure that meaning travels across systems, committees, and countries.

“If we want research assessment to be fair, transparent, and future-proof, we must build it on open infrastructures and co-create it with the communities who will use it.” -Giulia Malaguarnera, OpenAIRE

How OpenAIRE supports researchers, RPOs, and RFOs in research assessment reform 

Looking ahead: from overload to understanding

The Pisa conference made one thing evident: Europe is not only revising its research assessment systems—it is redefining the purpose of evaluation itself. OpenAIRE will continue strengthening its infrastructures, expanding pilots, and supporting national and institutional strategies, helping organisations move from policy commitments to day-to-day practice.

The goal is not to measure more, but to understand better, ensuring that excellent research—whether once trapped in Newton’s notebooks or now buried under today’s publication overflow—finally becomes visible.

If you are an RPO or RFO and you wish to discover the possibilities for your institution to adopt any of the OpenAIRE Services, contact Giulia Malaguarnera via helpdesk@openaire.eu.

On December 5, OpenAIRE joined the RDA Node Slovenia Workshop in Ljubljana, part of the Arnes Network of Knowledge conference. Researchers, IT experts, and policymakers gathered to discuss building Slovenia's open science infrastructure, advancing research data management, and preserving scientific heritage.

On November 26-27, the University of Maribor became a lively meeting ground for librarians, researchers, and policymakers to shape the future of Open Science and research infrastructure in Europe. Discover more about the event and OpenAIRE’s impactful contributions!

From March 13–14, 2025, the OSTrails consortium convened in Athens for its inaugural General Assembly, marking a pivotal transition from infrastructure development to widespread adoption. The event gathered over 65 in-person participants, complemented by numerous online attendees, including researchers, infrastructure managers, funders, developers, policymakers, and technical experts. This diverse assembly facilitated in-depth discussions on the current state and future evolution of Open Science within the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).

At the recentInternational Digital Curation Conference (IDCC25), OpenAIRE presented alightning talk on "Combining Algorithms and Human Expertise: OpenAIRE's Entity Disambiguation Method."Delivered byStefania Amodeo, the presentation highlighted OpenAIRE's innovative approach to maintaining high-quality metadata in theOpenAIRE Graph.

Eloy Rodrigues, a key member of the OpenAIRE Executive Board, recently shared his insights on the future of European repositories at the British Library during 'Open and Engaged 2024.' This initiative, launched by OpenAIRE, SPARC Europe, LIBER, and COAR, envisions a stronger, more connected European repository network. Read the details and stay updated!

In our latest Open Insights session, we dove into a topic at the heart of Open Science implementation: how to turn monitoring into a meaningful tool for institutions. The session focused on theusability and integration of the Irish Open Access Monitor within institutional workflows. With practical energy and a forward-thinking lens, the discussion unpacked real-world challenges and shared fresh perspectives on making monitoring not just a formality, but a driver of progress, strategy, and accountability in research ecosystems.