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The National Research Environment

There are over 170 education institutions within the UK. These vary from research-led universities like Oxford, or Edinburgh, through to far smaller specialist organisations which may have more of the teaching focus. The Universities are divided into different groupings: those of the research led universities are the Russell Group and the 1994 Group. These two groups hold the top 40 research led institutions. At the time of writing every Russell Group University has an institutional repository, as is the case for all but two of the 19 universities of the 1994 Group.

Major research funders / Funder mandates

Most government funding for research in UK universities is directed through the seven research councils, which collectively are known as RCUK. Most of the individual councils have now adopted mandates for open access dissemination of the research outputs that they fund. Another significant Funder in the UK (although they work internationally) is the Wellcome Trust. The Wellcome Trust has a mandate which requires grant recipients to make their information available through open access -- in this case through the repository UKPMC. Major charity funders include, Cancer Research UK and British Heart Foundation, both of whom have open access policies. Further information on funding requirements in the UK and internationally is available through the JULIET service.

EC research funding

In 2008, €739,576,247 (Approx. £649,823,968) was spent by the EU on research within the UK (Source: http://ec.europa.eu). Compared to £354m from Cancer Research UK alone in the same year (Source: Cancer Research UK Annual Report & Accounts 2008-09)

According to Peter Walters, within the first two years (2007-2009) there was €1.9b spent in FP7 ICT theme research projects with UK participants (Source: EU Funded Collaborative Research, Peter Walters, ICT NCP, Digital Libraries and Digital Preservation Information Day, 27th October 2009).

 

Open Access and Repositories

According to a Key Perspectives 2008 report, researchers are not fully aware of open access, however this awareness is growing.  (Source: Key Concerns within the Scholarly Communications Process (2008). Key Perspectives. Commissioned by JISC.)

Since 2008, awareness of open access has increased, particularly in the subject areas covered by funding agency mandates. The majority of UK based researchers are now covered by either a funders’ mandate (16) and/or institutional mandate (24), and have access to an institutional or subject repository (168). However, this awareness is not yet translating into depositions. (Source: OpenDOAR, JULIET and ROARMAP).

Open Access Projects

The vast majority of open access projects and initiatives have been funded by the JISC. The JISC is responsible for the disbursement of funding for the development of IT in higher education. The organisation has been responsible for much of the initiative and strategy in the development of the UK's open access environment. A full list of all of the open access projects that have been funded by the JISC would be impractical to list here. The JISC website has links to these projects through the different funded programmes through which they are managed. Some significant projects are as follows:

  • Repository Support Project (RSP)
  • Digital preservation & records management programme
  • Start-up and Enhancement Projects Training (SUETr)
  • ERIS (Enhancing Repository Infrastructure in Scotland)
  • SHERPA
  • EThOS
  • DART-Europe
  • Welsh Repository Network
  • Open Access Repository Junction
  • XPERT
  • Copyright Licensing Applications using SWORD for Moodle

JISC has also funded various OAJ overlay projects such as:

  • Repository Interface for Overlaid Journal Archives (RIOJA)
  • Overlay journal infrastructure for Meteorological Sciences (OJIMS)

Open Access Repositories

There are currently 192 repositories containing full-text content within the UK (Source: OpenDOAR, Jan 2012). This figure includes institutional and disciplinary repositories.

Open Access Publishing

There are currently 529 journals published within the UK. (Source: DOAJ Jan 2012).  In addition, the United Kingdom is home to several OAJ publishers including Open Access Central Publishers – BioMed Central, Chemistry Central and Physics Central; Academic Conferences International and Dove Medical Press.

Many UK based traditional publishers provide Paid Open Access options, such as BMJ Publishing, Cambridge University Press, Maney and the Royal Society.

Open Access organisations and groups

SHERPA Partnership - the SHERPA partnership grew out of the original SHERPA project (2002 -- 2006). It currently holds over 30 institutional members, and an Affiliate Partnership programme is available.
 

UKCoRR - is a professional body for repository managers within the UK. As such, it concentrates on the practicalities of running institutional repositories rather than advocacy of open access itself. More information can be gained from its website.

ERIS - (Enhancing Repositry Infrastructure in Scotland) is an initiative funded by the JISC for the development of user-led solutions that will motivate researchers to deposit their work in repositories, and facilitate the integration of repositories into research and institutional processes.

ePrints.org - eprints software was the original institutional repository software, developed at the University of Southampton. This software now powers a significant fraction of the world's open access repositories and is under continuous development.

Welsh Repository Network - is an ongoing project that has been funded by JISC to create a network of twelve repositories across Wales. Welsh Repository Network Enhancement Project will build on the earlier work through investigating the potential of a collaborative, centrally managed model to accelerate the development and uptake of repository services by Welsh HEIs.

 

Useful links and resources

Websites

Email lists

  • JISC-REPOSITORIES

Blogs

Wikis

 

 

Contributors Contact Details

Bill Hubbard: bill.hubbard@nottingham.ac.uk

National OA Desk: openaire@nottingham.ac.uk

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The National Research Environment

How are Research Institutions (universities, research centers) organised nationally?

Public entities: research-development institutes, centers or stations organized as public institutions, research-development institutes or centers organized within national firms, national companies and regies autonomes or the ones belonging to public central and local administration, international research-development centers created on the basis of international agreements, other public institutions or their components that have the research-development activity in their statutes.

Private entities: research-development entities organized as firms, firms and their components that have the research-development activity in their statutes, private accredited universities or their departments.

Major research funders

Who are the major funders of research nationally and do any have OA policies or mandates?

The funding agencies within the Ministry of Education, Research and Innovation include: The National Centre for Programme Management for RDI programmes, The Executive Unit for Funding Academic Research (as part of the National University Research Council) for RDI programmes in universities, The Managerial Agency for Scientific Research, Innovation and Technology Transfer (part of the Polytechnica University), Ministry of Labour, Family and Equal Opportunities through Sectorial Operational Programe Human Resources Development - Priority Axis 1: Education and training in support for growth and development of knowledge based society - Doctoral and postdoctoral programmes in support of research.

There are no open access policies and mandates in Romania.

EC research funding

What is the dimension and importance of EU funded research for national researchers/institutions

Romanian partner institutions and project leaders are involved in 273 FP7 consortia where 21 institutions are lead partners and 252 partners play an active role (10 projects started in 2007, 47 projects started in 2008, 103 projects started in 2009 and 14 started in 2010).

 

Open Access and Repositories

Is there an awareness of Open Access within the research community nationally?

There is a low level of awareness of Open Access within the Romanian research community.

Open Access repositories

What is the current status and distribution of OA repositories nationally?

ASPECKT is an institutional repository of the Transilvania University of Brasov, that at the moment functions as a repository for the doctoral, postgraduate and undergraduate theses from the Transilvania University of Brasov. In the future the content will be enriched with technical reports and conference papers, with the ultimate goal ASPECKT becoming a trusted repository for all the research activity carried out at the Transilvania University of Brasov.

Open Access publishing

What is the current status of OA journals published nationally?

There are 93 open access journals listed in the DOAJ.

Open Access organisations and groups

Kosson library and information science community: www.kosson.ro and www.acces-deschis.ro

Useful links and resources

National websites, blogs, wikis and email lists etc. in the area of OA

Open Access Disc – a preliminary collection of documents – an introduction to Open Access for all interested in scholarly communications and new publication models.

http://www.acces-deschis.ro – a portal designed to be the future central point for Open Access dissemination and also the seat of the OpenAIRE liaison office.

A group on Google Groups: acces-deschis[@]googlegroups.com

 

Contributors Contact Details and Contact details of the National Open Access Desk

Constantinescu Nicolaie – information architect, Kosson, kosson[@]gmail.com

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The National Research Environment

About 30 percent of Norwegian research is carried out in the higher education institutions. These are mainly governmental, but there are also a number of private institutions who receive government funding. R&D is mainly funded over the ordinary budgets of the institutions, but supplementary financing is obtained for programmes and equipment, mainly from the Research Council of Norway. There has been a substantial increase in research expenditure in the higher education sector from 2001 to 2009.

About 30 percent of Norwegian research is channeled through the Research Council of Norway. The Research Council identifies strategicresearch areas, allocates research funds and evaluates research within all fields and disciplines. The Council is the principal research policy adviser to the ministries, and acts as a meeting-place and network builder for Norwegian research. The Ministry of Education and Research has the administrative responsibility for the Research Council, but practically all ministries contribute to R&D programs and institutions funded by the Council.

More than 20 percent of Norwegian research is carried out in the institute sector. The sector is diverse in terms of R&D activity, research topics and size of institutes. Norwegian research institutes serve a wide range of clients, including the civil service and the industrial sector.

Open Access and Repositories

Open Access is increasingly on the national agenda, but few researchers are participating in the debate.  However, libraries and policy makers are engaged.   The Ministry of Education and Research has OA on its agenda, and it will require reports on institutional OA activities in 2010 from the institutions.

 All government funded universities and nearly all university colleges have an IR. Most private universities and some private university colleges have an IR, while only a few research institutes have access to an IR.

OA Journals

Currently, 19 accredited academic journals and 6 non-accredited are published OA in Norway. The 4 "old" universities (University of Oslo, University of Bergen, Norwegian University of Science and Technology og University of Tromsø) have established central OA publishing services to accommodate in-house journals and journals belonging to surrounding institutions. This results in institutional journals being more efficient in economic terms and in terms of technical quality, dissemination and services. 

OA Integration

 NORA – Norwegian Open Research Archives is an initiative launched by the 4 "old" universities to create a unified Norwegian OA development. Other Higher Education institutions have since joined in.  NORA was financed first  (2005–2007)  through The Norwegian Archive, Library and Museum Authority, and then later (2008–2010) by The Ministry of Education and Research. All IR development in Norway has been coordinated by NORA and has followed NORA metadata standards and vocabularies.

NORA has also, to some extent, supported the establishing of OA publishing services, and tries to co-ordinate activities related to OA journals. NORA operates a metadata harvesting operation that will provide metadata to DRIVER and to others, in addition to a national search service for OA resources. All Norwegian OA repositories are harvested, and NORA is currently starting to harvest Norwegian OAI-PMH compliant scientific OA journals and include their metadata in NORA's services.

Contributors Contact Details

The national OA website: http://www.ub.uit.no/wiki/openaccess/index.php/Hovedside (In Norwegian, with Norway-centered content for the Norwegian HE and Research sector and general public).
E-mail list for OA in Norway: norainfo@list.uit.no This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it (Open to all interested, but content is only in Norwegian. Only members may post to the list. To become a member, send an e-mail to jan.e.frantsvag@uit.no This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ).

Contributors Contact Details.
Jan Erik Frantsvåg, senior adviser
Phone (+47) 77 64 49 50
e-mail jan.e.frantsvag@uit.no

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The National Research Environment

There are seven universities in Ireland: University College Dublin (UCD), University College Cork (UCC), the National University of Ireland Galway (NUIG), the National University of Ireland Maynooth (NUIM), Trinity College Dublin, Dublin City University and the University of Limerick. St. Patrick’s College Maynooth (The Pontifical University) is included by the Irish Higher Education Authority as an eight university.

The National University of Ireland also has five recognised colleges - The Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, National College of Art and Design, the Institute of Public Administration, the Shannon College of Hotel Management and St. Angela’s College of Education for Home Economics.

In addition to the universities, an important part of the Irish higher education infrastructure is the thirteen Institutes of Technology located throughout the country.

For further details on Irish Higher Education please see: http://www.hea.ie/en/AboutHEA

Major research funders

EU research funding

From: ‘Ireland: major EU achievements in science & research 2004-2009’, European Commission, 2009:

“Ireland ranks 3rd for high-tech exports and 6th for FP7 success rate within the EU-27 countries”

The Sixth Framework Programme for Research (FP6), which ran between 2002 and 2006, supported about 200 million Euros of Irish research. Irish researchers were particularly successful in getting funding for research training, career  development and mobility schemes, through the ‘Human resources and mobility’ parts (which  are also known as ‘Marie Curie Actions’) of the programme ‘Structuring the European Research  Area (ERA)’. Here, 162 Irish research participants received more than 54 million Euros.  Elsewhere, Ireland was also successful in areas such as ‘Information Society Technologies’  (over 42 million Euros); ‘Nanotechnology and Nanosciences’ (nearly 21 million Euros); and ‘Sustainable Development, Global Change and Ecosystems’ (17 million Euros). Irish organisations were also active in   coordinating and participating in projects  under FP6. Some 891 Irish organisations were involved in 715 projects; 175 of these were led  by Irish organisations.

openaire_ireland_image1

The Seventh Framework Programme for research and technological development (FP7) is in operation from 2007 and 2013. By October 2008, Irish research organisations had secured EC contributions of around  42 million Euros through FP7. Irish research organisations are particularly successful in the following areas of research: ‘Information and Communication Technologies’ (20 million Euros), ‘Health’ (over 5 million Euros), and ‘Food, Agriculture, and Biotechnology’ (over 3 million Euros). Also, they secured signifcant funding through ‘Marie Curie Actions’ for research training, career development and researcher mobility schemes (over 3 million Euros), and ‘Research Infrastructures’, which optimise the use and development of the best and existing research infrastructures in Europe (over 2 million Euros). The Irish are the lead coordinators in 23 FP7 projects and over 160 Irish organisations are involved in 139 projects.

openaire_ireland_image2

  

Open Access and Repositories

Awareness of Open Access has increased within the research community nationally, particularly since institutional repositories have been built in each Irish university. Advocacy programmes and funder mandates (IRCSET, SFI, HEA) have had a positive effect. There is still some way to go before the majority of Irish researchers will automatically deposit their papers in their local OA repository. Institutional mandates requiring open access archiving of research publications have been adopted in three institutions to date: Dublin Institute of Technology, National University of Ireland, Maynooth and Trinity College Dublin.

If so, describe any activities or projects underway nationally e.g. funder policies/mandates, OA repositories projects/initiatives, development of OA journals etc.

Open Access projects and initiatives

The Open Access to Irish Research Project
Irish universities received government funding to build institutional repositories in each Irish university and to develop a federated harvesting and discovery service via a national portal. It is intended that this collaboration will be expanded to embrace all Irish research institutions in the future.

This three-year project started in April 2007 and ended in March 2010. The project was directed by the Irish Universities Association and managed by the Irish Universities Association Librarians’ Group. A press release on the project from the Irish Universities Association is available at this link. ‘Rian’, the Ireland's Narional Open Access Research Portal, harvests metadata from the institutional repositories of the Rian partner institutions. Rian was launched in October, 2010.

For further information on Rian please contact John Cox, (Librarian, National University of Ireland, Galway, Chair of the IUA Librarians’ Group and of the Rian Steering Group).

Related Projects:

  • DART-Europe
  • DRIVER
  • OpenAIRE: Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe
  • e-InfraNet : European network for co-ordination of policies and programmes on e-infrastructures

Associated National Initiatives:

Open Access repositories

Open Access repositories are currently available in all Irish universities and in a number of other higher education institutions:

Higher Education:

Institutional repositories

Subject repository

Government Agency:

Open Access publishing

A complete list of Irish OA journals is not immediately available. The following list is a sample only and will be expanded following investigation:

Crossings: Electronic Journal of Art and Technology

Economic and Social Review

Journal of the Society for Musicology in Ireland

Journal of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland

Minerva: an Internet Journal of Philosophy

The Surgeon: Journal of the Royal Colleges of Surgeons of Edinburgh and Ireland

Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine

Open Access organisations and groups

  • Rian Steering Group
  • IUA (Irish Universities Association) Librarian’s Group (Coordinating body)
  • National Steering Group on Open Access Policy

Useful links and resources

 

Contributors Contact Details

Niamh Brennan, Trinity College Dublin
Email: niamh.brennan@tcd.ie
Phone: +353 1 896 1646

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The National Research Environment

Very few countries offer such a diverse higher education landscape as Germany: Germany currently numbers 347 Higher Education and over 250 public research institutions. Most of the higher education institutions are financed publicly (238), but there is also a large number of private universities which used to play only a subordinate role but gain more and more importance. Currently major changes are taking place in German higher education: The federal Government and the federal states initiated the Excellence Initiative to promote competition between universities. A large number of new ideas and projects have already been realized as a result of the Excellence Initiative. Important institutions in the German research landscape are also the big research institutions such as the Max Planck Society, the Helmholtz Association, the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft and the Leibniz Association.

German research organizations and funders actively support OA projects and initiatives.

Major research funders

The major research funder in Germany is the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) which has tied open access into its funding policy: “When entering into publishing contracts scientists participating in DFG-funded projects should, as far as possible, permanently reserve a non-exclusive right of exploitation for electronic publication of their research results for the purpose of open access. Here, discipline specific delay periods of generally six to twelve months can be agreed upon, before which publication of previously published research results in discipline-specific or institutional electronic archives may be prohibited.” Other funders like the Volkswagen Foundation (VolkswagenStiftung) support OA publishing in financial terms (see the overview at open-access.net). Beside nationally funded research European research projects are gaining more and more importance in the last years.

Open Access and Repositories

In the federal environment of Germany, the strong competition among universities and research institutions is stimulating - but also challenging – to the development of Open Access publication strategies and digital repositories. At present, there is no OA mandate (compare ROARMAP), but some OA statements of German universities and research institutions/organizations are in place. The most prominent statement in use is the 2003 “Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities”, signed by approx. 250 international research institutions/organizations (with >30 from Germany, including the German Rectors’ Conference which includes 258 universities and other HE institutions; the Max Planck Society, the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, the Helmholtz Association and the Leibniz Association).

Open Access Repositories

Many universities and research institutions in Germany run an institutional or subject-based repository, some of these centrally managed by umbrella organizations. Today, there are about 150 OA repositories in Germany: 124 OAI repositories according to OpenDOAR, plus those listed by DINI (for more information about DINI see below) and OAI service providers (like BASE, OAIster, and Scientific Commons). The majority of German repositories are based on the OPUS software, followed by DSpace, MyCore, FEDORA and Eprints as well as locally developed software options. Over 40 repositories operate on platforms that are centrally managed by country-state library networks in Cologne, Berlin, Jena, Munich, and Constance. The most relevant organization in Germany for supporting a national repository infrastructure is the German Initiative for Network Information (DINI). It has initiated several projects to support the technical development of a network of digital repositories and actively encourages the process of DINI certification. The certification process evaluates and improves the quality of publication services by referring to international standards and quality criteria. In consequence, the process improves data quality and conformity to enable services and the networking of repositories. Together with the DARE guidelines, the DINI certificate served as a basis for the DRIVER Guidelines for Content Providers.

Open Access Publishing

According to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) there are 185 German OA journals. Some of these journals are hosted by OA journal platforms, but most are run individually by research institutions and learned societies. Important platforms which host OA Journals are:  Copernicus Publications, Digital Peer Publishing NRW, German Medical Science, Living Reviews

Open Access projects and initiatives

There are also several projects in the field of Open Access, a list of all projects can be found here. The most central ones are the following:

  • Information platform open-access.net: The main aim of the platform open-access.net is to provide detailed information about open access for scholars and other stakeholders. For example, scholars from different disciplines can find information about the OA culture in their respective communities, about OA journals and repositories, etc. Moreover, information is presented from different user perspectives: authors, librarians, OA publishers, institutions running OA repositories, and so on. They may access more general information, dedicated to the respective group/interests, by short articles, or via FAQs, providing answers for more practical issues.
  • Network of certified Open Access repositories and related projects: In order to increase the worldwide perception and effect of the German Research contribution, the project "Network of certified Open Access Repositories” OA-Network seeks to intensify the national networking of repositories. It aims to virtually integrate all document and publication services with a DINI certificate and to increase the number of DINI certified repositories. These certified repositories easily blend in overall networks such as the DRIVER pan-European repository infrastructure (Repositories Infrastructure Vision for European Research).  Networking will not only be pushed forward organisationally, but also technically and infrastructurally.

Useful links and resources

The state-of-the-art of the OA movement in Germany is described in several publications, for example the book "Open Access. Chancen und Herausforderungen" published 2007 by the Deutsche UNESCO-Kommission (English version in preparation), and the special issue “Open Access”, Zeitschrift für Bibliothekswesen und Bibliographie, Vol. 54 (2007), Nr. 4/5. (mostly in German, author’s copies can be found here).

Further information can be found on the central German website on open access open-access.net, where also current local news & events are listed.

 

Contributors Contact Details

Anja Oberlaender
Library of the University of Konstanz

Email: anja.oberlaender@uni-konstanz.de

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