Jean-Claude Guédon, Professeur honoraire of digital humanities, Université de Montréal, is a leading proponent of Open Science. He has been following OpenAIRE from its birth and we feel priviliged for his advice all these years.  We asked him to write a few words about us and our work for our 10 year anniversary. 

The production of knowledge, of good knowledge - i.e. knowledge that has been subjected to intense criticism by competent people - is never as effective as when it approximates a broad, intense and free conversation. Obstacles to that conversation either delay or, worse, distort that conversation.

OpenAIRE initially emerged as a way to enhance the Great Conversation underpinning the production of knowledge. By collecting the results of research at the sites where the research is conducted, nodes of the OpenAIRE network are in a privileged position to achieve this goal better and more efficiently than anyone else.

Through its networking efforts, OpenAIRE ensures a wide dissemination of the collected materials within and beyond the network itself. By moving beyond published documents, and integrating data, software and other forms of documentation, OpenAIRE spontaneously places itself in the broad and powerful perspective of Open Science. Of course, OpenAIRE can also and easily register the research results it chooses to handle, and it can move beyond its experiments with the certification of research results to promote its own vision of intellectual value.

Finally, as a network of repositories, it can preserve all the accumulated wealth of knowledge stored in the network. The end result is that OpenAIRE can easily and strongly claim that it can PUBLISH: it holds all of the publishing functions within its remit. It can manage them without opening the gates to perverse feedback mechanisms such as journal-based branding systems. It can focus on the actual content of the research being introduced into the Great Conversation of research. It can publish without artificially intensifying competition between researchers, laboratories and institutions.

In short, OpenAIRE is the example of a research world where the central tools are platforms accompanied by their appropriate (and transparent) algorithms, and where journals, rather that being prestige-building instruments, act as reflections of crucial problems or vibrant research communities. OpenAIRE offers a strong vision of what a healthy scholarly and scientific infrastructure should look like. Long and productive life to OpenAIRE!"

OpenAIRE offers a strong vision of what a healthy scholarly and scientific infrastructure should look like. Long and productive life to OpenAIRE!