To join OpenAIRE a limited metadata set is required from funders in simple file formats (e.g.: .csv, .xlsx, .tsv, etc.) formalised via a  Memorandum of Understanding. No personal or private details are required.

OpenAIRE has a number of funders already integrated. Please, take a look at the existing funders in our services (i.e. Explore and Monitor).

For example, if projects also have titles or acronyms (e.g. this is valid for EC funding but does not apply to all funders), then this additional information can be used by the mining algorithm to calculate a more precise confidence to any matches to project numbers that are found; false matches can also be more easily identified and rejected when additional information is present.

If you are a funder you can contact your National Open Access Desk - NOAD, and provide in simple file formats (e.g.: .csv, .xlsx, .tsv, etc.) the metadata sets as described in the section “Join OpenAIRE”.

The list of your projects can be accompanying with a signed “Agreement for Data Exchange” which you can download it from here.

Once obtained a funder’s projects there is a 2 weeks period in average for analysing data.
Funder’s and NOADs provide feedback before and after displaying data on Beta, Production and Monitor.

The content aggregation process from many different sources, from Europe and beyond, enables to cover all the European and International area. Thus, it allows scientific output cross-linked with different funders to produce advanced statistics (e.g. co-funded research results, research trends, etc.).

Making a difference

Furthermore, using topic modeling mechanisms we discover hidden thematic structure in the OA scientific literature. We then extend this analysis to identify useful patterns, similarities, correlations trends and communities in order to get insight on national or funder specific programmes and schemes.

As a funder you can support the scholarly communication environment via these concrete steps:

• Support repositories to include funding information in their bibliographic metadata. This helps join up systems!
• Expose basic and public information (i.e. Funder name / Project ID) to repositories.

If this happens, everything can be streamlined. Results can be automatically monitored and reported back to funders.