OpenAIRE2020 was conceived to help implement and monitor these activities by promoting open scholarship and substantially improving the discoverability and reusability of research publications and data. The initiative brings together professionals from 50 institutions all over Europe, including research libraries, open scholarship organisations, national e-Infrastructure and data experts, as well as, IT and legal researchers. The network of National Open Access Desks (NOADs) has been extended expanded once again (to 33 countries), in order to collect H2020 project outputs, and support research data management. Backing this vast outreach, the OpenAIRE platform continued its extension.
It pulled together and interconnected the large-scale collections of research outputs across Europe and created workflows and services on top of this valuable repository content, in order to enable an interoperable network of repositories (via the adoption of common guidelines), and easy upload into an all-purpose repository (via Zenodo). OpenAIRE2020 assisted in monitoring H2020 research outputs and was a key infrastructure for reporting H2020’s scientific publications, loosely coupled to the EC’s IT backend systems. The EC’s Research Data Pilot (extended to cover all H2020 projects from 2017 onwards) was supported through European-wide outreach for best research data management practices and Zenodo, which provided long-tail data storage. Other activities included: collaboration with national funders to reinforce the infrastructure’s research analytic services; an APC Gold OA pilot for FP7 publications with collaboration from LIBER; novel methods of review and scientific publishing; a study and a pilot on scientific indicators related to Open Access; legal studies to investigate data privacy issues relevant to the Open Data Pilot; and international alignment with related networks elsewhere with the involvement of COAR.