The EC is poised to fund a publishing platform for scholarly articles for Horizon2020 beneficiaries. The OpenAIRE consortium welcomes this tender for Open Research Europe. Any open publishing platform would be a significant contribution to the open scholarly landscape, as an additional pillar in the transition to Open Science. As such, OpenAIRE would actively seek a close collaboration with the successful consortium, to support this platform and facilitate its fruitful implementation in order to assist  Europe’s researchers to publish in Open Access. We are uniquely placed to reach researchers across Europe and can provide regional and national perspectives that positively influence new research and publishing cultures, and to connect with other Open Access and Open Science initiatives.

Where OpenAIRE is happy to collaborate

As the open scholarly infrastructure for Europe, OpenAIRE welcomes any development to provide a free, transparent and open publishing infrastructure for Europe’s researchers, especially to support the beneficiaries of Horizon2020 and subsequent programmes. OpenAIRE has the infrastructure and social network in place to support the take-up of and interaction with this new platform on the part of researchers in Europe. We look forward to supporting the successful party in the same way as we support our many data providers.

Technical 

OpenAIRE will work to maximise interoperability between ORE and core scholarly infrastructures across Europe and globally support the flow of scholarly outputs from ORE to any interested source, e.g. institutional, national, thematic repositories, publishers, CRIS systems, generic services. Specifically, the OpenAIRE Broker Service will ensure single deposition of metadata and files in ORE and distribution of such information towards other sources, e.g. institutional repository of the authors, SYGMA portal of the European Commission. Similarly, the Broker Service will send notifications to the ORE platform in order to enrich its metadata with metadata information relative to ORE records, e.g. links to projects from funders world-side, links to datasets, software or other products, etc. 

OpenAIRE will support ORE with infrastructure and technical support required to:

• verify and align to OpenAIRE 4.0 compliance 
• track usage statistics  relative to ORE records 
• bridge to OpenAIRE TDM services 
• link to OpenAIRE (EOSC) AAI 
• include ORE platform as a trusted EOSC source via the Research Community Dashboard. 

Last but not the least, Zenodo.org will be available via APIs as a scientific product storage layer, onto which the ORE platform can rely to persistently store articles, data, software, and any kind of research object, assign the DOIs and metadata, plus links to other scholarly scientific products word-wide.  

Outreach and Training

• Build awareness: Leverage national research communities, including researcher communities through the OpenAIRE European network (National Open Access Desks). Also support raising awareness with other relevant stakeholders in the scholarly communications system, building awareness of ORE, open access and Open Science. 
• Training: Help to design, test and roll-out training materials or modules that are developed by the successful contractor.
• Support via OpenAIRE Helpdesk: OpenAIRE’s network of open access desks (NOADs) are a well-known and respected national landmarks for researchers, institutions and libraries to find information on open access and the EC H2020 Framework Programme. The points of contact already exist to support the practical implementation of open science across Europe and we therefore propose to extend their remit to additionally support awareness, uptake and feedback on ORE. 

Governance

• Essential is that this platform is based on open, interoperable standards and open principles of governance. OpenAIRE’s approach on governance is that a wide community of experts should govern all aspects of any platform, from editorial boards to technical roll-out. This managed consensual activity would have oversight of several important areas, including: the ownership of publishing process assets; overview of transparent workflows between authors and editors; trustworthy terms and conditions for sharing and access of articles; ownership of data; decisions on budget and management of funds.
• OpenAIRE will bring the community perspective to any discussions around sustainability and to embed plans within the broader context for open science via our series of workshops and webinars. 
• By using existing networks, OpenAIRE will support any dialogue on new, innovative publishing models. Non-APC models to open access publishing are considered part of the development of future financing/business and sustainability models.