Discover how Ireland’s Open Science community is connecting and learning through the newly launched Open Insights Series—your guide to leveraging the National Open Access Monitor for impactful decision-making. Read more!
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!
There are 14 research universities in the Netherlands, organised in the UNL (Universiteiten van Nederland). 30 per cent of all research is done at these universities. All eight University Medical Centres (UMCs), which are members of the Netherlands Federation of University Medical Centres (NFU), are partnerships between a teaching hospital and the medical faculty of a university.
In addition, there are several research institutes: 10 hosted by KNAW (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) and 9 by the National Research Funder NWO.
The 36 universities of applied sciences are taking on a growing role in research and are organised in the Netherlands Association of Universities of Applied Sciences (Vereniging van Hogescholen).
All information on the Dutch research environment can be found at 'Science in figures' of the Rathenau Institute (institute of the KNAW).
Researchers at the UM conduct research in various fields, and as the sole University on the island, the UM has particular responsibility to cater for study areas on a national dimension. In September 2009, the UM has set up a Corporate Research and Knowledge Transfer Directorate so as to assist the UM to transform itself into a contemporary third-generation University built on three significant pillars, being teaching, corporate research, and direct and active participation in sustainable socio-economic development.
The UM Library is actively participating in OpenAIRE as well as contributing towards various Open Access initiatives both at the institutional and national level. To this end, in October 2014, the UM Library launched the first Open Access institutional repository (IR) on the island, OAR@UM. The scope of this endeavour is to enhance the visibility as well as preserve the intellectual output and research being carried out at the UM. This digital repository holds the research publications of scholars affiliated with the UM, together with digital items including audio visual material. Moreover, owing to the fact that OAR@UM is the sole Open Access repository on the Maltese Islands, the UM is providing the opportunity to non-UM researchers to upload their research output on its repository. Hence, the remit of OAR@UM has been extended to cater as a national Open Access repository for Malta.
The UM has also implemented an Open Access Policy whereby academics and researchers are encouraged to upload their research output in Open Access. The policy advocates in favour of Green Open Access – nevertheless, the UM will be supporting Gold Open Access when funds for Article Process Charges are available.
The main institutions in the R&D system are the Research and Development Council, the Government Office for Science, Research and Innovations, the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, and other administrative authorities responsible for R&D in their jurisdictions, government departments with their own budgetary chapters.
The Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports is the central body of state administration, among other things, for science policy, research and development, including international cooperation in this field.
The Research, Development and Innovation Council is an expert and advisory body of the Government in the field of research, experimental development and innovation.
Czech ERA Portal is an initiative of the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports and is operated in cooperation with the Technology Centre of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.
The Government Office for Science, Research and Innovations is responsible for the R&D Information System (Czech National CRIS – IS VaVaI 2.0).
The Czech Republic National Strategy of Open Access to Scientific Information for 2017–2020 was approved by the Government on June 14, 2017 as part of Czech Open Government Partnership activities.
Research in Norway is carried out mainly by Higher Education Institutions, Research Institutes and Research Hospitals. There are currently 10 universities and 22 university colleges in Norway, and some 60+ Research Institutions.
Research is mainly funded by the Norwegian Research Council, but there are some smaller public and private funding agencies as well.
All Norwegian research output is reported in the national CRIS-system (CRIS), Cristin.
Norway is represented in the EOSC Governing Board and the working groups EOSC FAIR, EOSC Architecture, EOSC Rules for Participation and EOSC Skills and training.
Norway is participating in the EOSC-Nordic project and OCRE through Géant.
In Italy research is performed mainly by higher education institutions (mainly public and few private universities, polytechnics, research centres) and other types of public institutions. Business enterprises and private not for profit organizations also carry out research in different fields. The public funding comes mainly from the central government and on a smaller scale from regional governments. A relevant role is also played by EU framework programme funding. Private organizations also fund research in different fields. Between 2008 and 2018 the percentage of Open Access (OA) publications was roughly estimated to be about 40% over the total number of publications published by Italian institutions (source: Open Science Monitor, European commission).
France has played an important role in the European open access movement, particularly in the launch of theBerlin declaration, a cooperation between the Max Planck Society and people from the CNRS. French research institutions (CNRS, INSERM in particular) played a major role in early 2000, especially with the launch of theHAL open archive in 2001.
France also set forth an important initiative regarding open access journals with the Revues.org platform founded in 1999 and specialized in Humanities and Social Sciences. It is operated by a joint service unit bringing together the CNRS, two universities (Aix-Marseille and Université d’Avignon et des Pays de Vaucluse) and a grande école (EHESS). Revues.org hosts more than 465 journals, 192 of them being fully open access. Universities and grandes écoles joined the open access movement gradually and it is worth noting that some universities have been working on open access publishing (Nice with the database Revel) and Open Archives (in Toulouse for instance) since 2003. After the signature of a national agreement in 2006, aiming to foster OA, some universities and grandes écoles established an institutional open archive. As of 2017, 95 of them do have an institutional repository. Couperin also facilitates this movement through a working group focused on open access. The movement is progressively growing and for example, the Jussieu call shows a real concern of the research community on OA issues.
The Ministry of Education and Culture is responsible for the planning and implementation of higher education and science policy. There are a total of 13 universities and 22 universities of applied sciences in Finland. A total of 12 State research institutes operate under the auspices of the other ministries. The Academy of Finland is a key source of funding for scientific research in Finland, and it operates under the mandate of the Ministry's Department for Higher Education and Science Policy.
The Federation of Finnish Learned Societies (TSV) is an independent state-subsidized organisationthat promotes the communication and publication of scientific data and increases awareness of research data and its utilisation by society. TSV coordinates national level Open Science co-operation.
The National Research Environment
Turkey is about to be one of the biggest higher education landscape with the 207 universities in Europe. The 129 of these universities are financed publicly, and the 78 left are the private universities that are also performing higher education activities at the national and international levels. Yüksek Öğretim Kurulu -YÖK (The Council of Higher Education - CoHE)has been administrating the activities of the universities in Turkey.
Updated in August 2022.
As an EU Member State, Slovenia is part of the European Research Area (ERA) and is implementing open science according to the Conclusions of the Council of the European Union and the European Commission's recommendations.
The national open access strategy 2015-2020 (prolongued to 2021) was fully aligned with provisions on open access in Horizon 2020. From 2022 onwards, Slovenian legislative provisions on open science are fully aligned with Horizon Europe (see Open Science Policy tab). Researchers therefore comply with open science provisions in the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation and in national open science legislation in the same way.
The national open science infrastructure consists of:
- Repositories with full-text peer-reviewed publications, final works of studies at universities and research data, and the national portal Open Science Slovenia with harvested metadata records;
- Research infrastructures;
- Computing and storage facilities, among them supercomputer Vega.
The University of Maribor Library and Academic and Research Network of Slovenia (ARNES) are partners in the NI4OS-Europe project (National Initiatives for Open Science in Europe) that facilitates collaboration of national open science stakeholders and onboarding of national open science infrastructures into the EOSC.
Mr Peter Sterle from the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport acts as the National Point of Reference according to the Commission Recommendation of 25 April 2018 on access to and preservation of scientific information, and participates in the EOSC Steering Board.
Open Science in Poland is originally a bottom-up movement. However, in recent years awareness of Open Access issues has been rising steadily. In 2008, members of the European University Association – among them 43 Polish higher education institutions and the Conference of Rectors of Academic Schools in Poland – issued their Recommendations from the EUA Working Group on Open Access, postulating the establishment of institutional repositories networked on the national and European level. In July 2013, the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Conference of Rectors of Academic Schools in Poland have jointly published a statement in support of the Green Road to Open Access, calling for institutional repositories to be established in all scientific units in the country. Finally, in October 2015, the Ministry of Science and Higher Education (MNiSW) issued a document entitled „Kierunki rozwoju otwartego dostępu do treści naukowych w Polsce” (in Polish only; for a discussion of this document in English see the blog post "Poland: Initial open access policy") which sets specific OA recommendations for all major stakeholders in Poland.
In March 2018, the Ministry of Science and Higher Education (MNiSW) published a report on the implementation of open access policy („Raport nt. realizacji polityki otwartego dostępu do publikacji naukowych w latach 2015-2017”, in Polish only). The document summarized the efforts that had been undertaken in years 2015-2017, identified barriers to open access and provided recommendations for further work. In 2018, the Polish parliament passed the Law on Higher Education and Science, the so-called Law 2.0. It provided the framework for the reform of the higher education system.
EOSC in Austria
EOSC national representatives
EOSC Austrian Governance Board Country Delegate is Stefan Hanslik from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research.
Stefan Hanslik gives answers to these questions and explains his role in the Governance Board in the following three video interviews:
The videos were produced within the Austrian role as a partner in the H2020 project EOSCSecretariat. They are licensed with an open CC-license, so we encourage further reuse and dissemination.
Austrian Preparation for EOSC Contribution:
In the call for proposals "Digital and social transformation in higher education", some submissions also revolved around the topic of Open Science and Open Access. One notable example is "Austrian Transition to Open Access 2" (AT2OA²) the continuation of AT2OA, which aims to further promote the free accessibility of scientific publications. This also applies to the projects "RIS Synergy", "Austrian DataLab Austria" and "FAIR Data", which are combined in the Research Data cluster and are being implemented (under the lead of Vienna University of Technology and Graz University of Technology).
They are among those projects that will further advance the European Open Science Cloud. EOSC is a data infrastructure referred to as the "Internet of scientific data and data services" or European Open Science Cloud, i.e. a Europe-wide user-friendly environment of digital research data consisting of existing e-infrastructures across national and disciplinary borders. It aims to provide European researchers with access to first-class computing, storage and analysis capacities located in Europe. This will also facilitate the open exchange of data, e.g. as part of the "Open Research Data Pilot". To achieve this goal uniform international standards are needed.
In 2018, during the Austrian Presidency of the Council of the European Union and through the Vienna Declaration on the European Open Science Cloud, the EOSC Governance was launched at the University of Vienna.
EU Funded Projects
EOSC Pillar in Austria - AUSSDA / Vienna University Library
EOSC-Pillar is one of several Horizon 2020 projects aimed at building the Open Science and FAIR data-based European Open Science Cloud (EOSC): the focus is on data management, data services and data policy in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany and Italy.
EOSC will support the infrastructures and services to increase the FAIRness of data across national and disciplinary boundaries. It involves communities, stakeholders, infrastructures and researchers to actively shape these processes. Joint developments on an organizational, technical or legal level make EOSC-Pillar a catalyst for the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).
EOSC Secretariat - TU Wien
Austrian EOSC Secretariat team: Andreas Rauber, Paolo Budroni (Austrian National E-IRG Delegate), Barbara Sanchez, Juliana Giroletti, Katharina Flicker, Bernd Saurugger
Most government funding for research in UK universities is directed through Research Councils UK (RCUK), Wellcome Trust, and UK Research and Innovation. Those three funders have all adopted mandates for open access dissemination of the research outputs that they fund. Major charity funders include Cancer Research UK and the British Heart Foundation, both of whom have open access policies. Further information on funding requirements and publisher policies in the UK and internationally are available through the Sherpa/JULIET and Sherpa/ROMEO services.
Jisc and Jisc Collections have been foremost in their efforts to promote open access initiatives: promoting the desiderata for what publishers could do; the designing and building of such services as the Publications Router and Jisc Monitor, and the continued development of Counter compliant metrics through IRUS. RIOXX standards also are aligned with various UK repositories and with the work done for OpenAIRE Advance
According to the EC’s Open Science monitor based on Scopus and Unpaywall data, Switzerland holds a top position for the percentage of OA publications. As the very high proportion of green OA shows, this seems to be due to a well-developed network of OA repositories and support teams at most research institutions.
The academic research institutions of Switzerland receive much of their financial support either from the respective cantons and/or from the federal Swiss government (State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation - SERI). As a result of these federal dependencies, national policies and guidelines have not been implemented in the past. However, a national Open Access strategy and an action plan adopted in 2017 help to align the different approaches.