New fact sheet for funders

Written on Jun 27, 2017.

OpenAIRE is pleased to announce a new fact sheet for funders interested in monitoring services for their Open Science policies.

The OpenAIRE fact sheet for Funders includes guidance to our monitoring services that can help funders measure research funding impact and supports monitoring of Open Access.

As more and more open science policies are backing a general shift towards open research, funders are looking for ways to assess the effectiveness of their policies. But monitoring compliance to Open Science policies and practices at all stages of the research life-cycle, across research communities and geographical areas, poses a major challenge to funders.

monitor Because the technical infrastructure of OpenAIRE collects information about research objects throughout the research life-cycle from different types of data sources and scientific fields across geographic areas, OpenAIRE can help monitor the success of an open science policy for specific funders. Linking research outcomes available from
OpenAIRE with funder information, gives us the possibility to provide detailed information and develop specific serverces aimed at funders.
We can provide funders with information on what publications come out of funding streams, how many of those publications are available as Open Access publication and provide a time-line of the uptake of Open Access policies.

How does it work?

Our international socio-technical network supports the implementation and monitoring of Open Science policies, including Open Access to publications and research data, for a range of stakeholders: monitor02

Monitoring is achieved by means of an infrastructure composed of a decentralized network of data sources, namely publication repositories, data repositories, publishers, and current research information systems. By harnessing the contents of “compatible” publication and data repositories (both institutional and disciplinary) and linking them to other research entities (researchers, institutions, projects, funding information), OpenAIRE produces a 360 degree picture of the impact of research funding.

Due to the rich variety of sources (institutional and thematic repositories, data repositories, CRIS-systems, OA journals and journal platforms), OpenAIRE can help with the measurement of the impact of funded research and the return on investment of national and international funding agencies.
A limited set of information in the form of metadata is needed from funders to generate information and statistics.
The metadata fields required from funders is limited to:

Project identifiers
Project title or acronym
Funder name
Start date
End date
And optional:
Funding streams to provide more detailed statistics per funding categories
Participant organizations to identify e.g. project partners.

By provided this limited set of metadatafields in a simple file format (e.g. CSV) OpenAIRE can aggregate all the necessary information. That’s all.

How to benefit?

Through the OpenAIRE portal and APIs, funders are able to:

Report, analyse and follow up compliance with Open Access policies
Analysis and reporting of research impact
Filter publications or data by specific criteria such as funding streams
Search via project title, acronym or grant agreement and view specific statistics of the project: publications/data over time, OA status, research output location, and much more
View overall funder statistics (facets over time, data sources, institutions, etc.)
Report and analyse uptake of Open Access policies

The richness in terms of quantity and quality of research outcomes available from
OpenAIRE attracts a number of stakeholders of scholarly communication interested
in the analysis of project impact and return on investment.

At the moment there are 10 funders making use of our monitoring services.
A number of other funders are in the process of being included as well.

funders