Research in Greece is carried out primarily by Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and Research Centers (RC). HEIs and public RCs are independent public-law bodies meaning they are self-administered but supervised and financed by the state. Currently, there are 25 HEIs with several departments and 40 public RCs including institutes and units that they are comprised of. As of 2019, HEIs activities fall under the supervision of the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs and RCs are supervised by the General Secretariat of Research and Technology (GSRT) of the Ministry of Development and Investments. A number of specialized research centres are nonetheless supervised by other ministries. In addition to the above, research is carried out within other organisations like public and private hospitals, museums, private companies, etc. albeit to a smaller extent when compared to universities and research centres. The GSRT, the main public funder, supports the activities of research organisations and productive sectors of the economy through competitive funding.
National Open Access Desk
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Overview
Support and Landscape
OpenAIRE National Open Access Desk (NOAD) in Greece provides guidance and support to researchers in receipt of Horizon 2020 funding as well as to all other interested parties like policy makers interested in adopting OS/OA policies, repository managers about compatibility with OpenAIRE guidelines and making their content more visible, research funders on content aggregation and monitoring of results.
Athena Research and Innovation Center supports the development and adoption of Open Access and Open Science policies in Greece. It leads engagement activities with key national stakeholders with an ultimate goal to deliver a national Open Science picture where responsibilities and workflows are well diffused and collaboration is achieved and ensured in the long run. Moreover, Athena RC supports the cultural shift towards Open Science by organising training events and webinars to inform the greek academic and research community about legal, procedural and technical aspects of Open Access and Open Science best practices.
HEAL-Link plays an important role in the national ecosystem as it supports Green Open Access activities for pre-prints deposited and preserved in institutional repositories. Through big deals achieved with publishers they ensure accessibility to a number of scientific databases and they also figh against eliminating Gold Open Access issues, such as the double-dipping phenomenon. They are strong advocates for OA in Greece and one of their greatest achievement is the Declaration on Open Access in Greece, including great support coming from the Minister of Education, Research and Religious Affairs (at the time), Prof. Dr. Kostas Gavroglou.
EKT is by law the responsible organisation that runs and maintains the National Archive of PhD Theses and offers an e-publishing platform for Greek OA publishers.National Initiatives
In 2017, the General Secretariat of Research and Technology (GSRT) established a Working Group (WG) of consultative nature to support GSRT with the development of a national strategy on Open Science. Members of the WG include key national stakeholders in the OS/OA ecosystem. The WG’s mission is:
- To map the current situation at national and European level and the necessary measure for formulating a national OS strategy aligned with the ERA roadmap and other related documents
- To present to the GSRT proposals regarding the potential involvement of other stakeholders at a later stageIn addition, since 2019 Athena Research and Innovation Center has set up and leads a bottom-up Open Science Task Force comprised from representatives of 25 national academic and research institutions, research infrastructures, national nodes and Open Science initiatives. The task force has worked to draft a proposal for a National Open Science Plan which is going to be released for public consultation in 2020.
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Open Science Policy
National Policy
Greece has not implemented a national Open Access/ Open Science policy yet. However, Law 4310/2014 supports open access to publicly funded research. Also, article 4 of Law N. 4485/2017 on Organisation and operation of higher education, arrangements for research and other provisions, mentions “open resources” as one of its mission without however specifying the type of resources.There are ongoing efforts by the National Open Science Task Force that worked to produce a National Open Science Plan. The plan includes provisions for open access to scientific ouputs produced from publicly funded streams and for better access to and FAIR-aligned infrastructures and services also according to EOSC standards and rules of participation as they are coming. It also proposes a roadmap for implementation.In terms of open data, the Greek Law already supports Open Data activities containing provisions that are similar to Open Science in nature, such as licensing of outputs. Law N. 3979/2011 on E-government and relevant regulations with amendments up to Law N. 4483/2017 and Law N. 4305/2014 on Open Access to and Further Use of Public Sector Documents, Information and Data with amendments up to Law N. 4483/2017 include specifications for public bodies’ infrastructures and introduce Creative Commons licenses to some outputs, respectively.Funder policy
Public funders have not yet adopted Open Access policies. Nonetheless, researchers funded under the “Diversity, inequalities and social inclusion” programme of the EEA financial mechanism (the GSRT being the programme operator) are expected to provide open access to their research outputs. Similarly, OA to research outputs may be provisioned through other regional funding streams like EPAnEk. The GSRT is planning to include in its future calls open access requirements similar to those of Horizon 2020.
Institutional Policy
Open Access policies are at a nascent stage in Greece, but there are intensive efforts by OpenAIRE Greek NOADs to change the current situation.According to ROARMAP, there are three HEIs, the Technical University of Crete (TUC) and the International Hellenic University (IHU) and Univerity of Patras that have adopted an Open Access policy, following the 2012 COM on access to and preservation of scientific information.TUC’s policy (adopted in 2014) encourages researchers to deposit all research outputs (journal articles, monographs, conference proceedings and technical reports) at the institutional repository and to provide open access upon publication or as soon as possible (respecting publishers’ policies). The deposit of PhD and master theses is mandatory. Researchers are also encouraged to deposit research data at the institutional or other appropriate data repository. The policy states that deposited items will be taken into consideration for evaluation purposes, while it also foresees a compliance monitoring mechanism.IHU’s policy (effective from February 2015) is by contrast to that of TUC foresees mandatory deposit. Open access is given at the time of deposit or as soon as possible. The policy encourages researchers to deposit their research data. The policy also foresees that compliance will be monitored.University of Patras encourages open access through the institutional repository "Nemertes". The policy covers research outputs (including publications and data) that are produced and/ or curated by the University of Patras faculty and staff and/ or is funded by the institution itself.Currently, those policies are being updated to reflect the new Recommendation for access to and preservation of scientific information. To coordinate and align practices, HEAL-Link and Athena Research Center worked together to produce a model Open Science policy template for Greek institutions. The Greek model policy was developed based on the OpenAIRE policy templates which were modified according to the needs of the national academic library community as identified in a landscape review on policy and technical readiness. The Greek model policy was presented to other librarians at a dedicated workshop entitled "Workshop on Open Science Policies at Higher Education Institutions: From Theory to Practice" at the Panhellenic Academic Libraries Conference in 2019 to foster discussions and get feedback before been finalised. -
Infrastructure & EOSC
Key networks & Aggregators
Literature aggregators
National Archive of PhD Theses - The National Archive of PhD Theses provides access to the PhD theses from all Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in Greece as well as PhD theses awarded to Greek scholars by foreign HEIs and certified by the Hellenic NARIC.
OpenArchives.gr and HELIX Pubs provide access to scientific content.Discipline specific:SearchCulture – aggregates Greek digital cultural content produced by institutions through public funding.Data aggregators
HELIX Data is the national data repository and at the same time operates as a national aggregator of data repositories. Currently, it harvests content from institutional data repositories included in HARDMIN.Data repositories
Literature Repositories
According to OpenDOAR there are 36 institutional repositories and digital libraries in Greece covering almost all academic libraries research outputs and digital material, from which 7 are compatible with OpenAIRE thus offering greater visibility of Greek research in the European area. These are:- DIAS (Technical University of Crete)
- Dione & European Documentation Centers (University of Piraeus)
- HELIOS (National Hellenic Research Foundation)
- IKEE (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)
- Nemertes (University of Patras)
- Psifiothiki (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki) - under validation
Additionally, Kallipos is an initiative aimed at introducing e-textbooks in higher education. The “Kallipos Action” was developed by the Hellenic Academic Libraries Link (HEAL-Link), the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and the National Research Network (EDET). It was funded by the European Social Fund and the Ministry of Education Operational Programme “Education and Lifelong learning”.
Data repositories
According to Re3Data, there are 10 data repositories in Greece. However, this is not the same case as with literature repositories, where each repository belongs to an institution. Most of the times, data repositories and data centers are part of a wider network of European or International infrastructures, hence they are not exclusively developed in Greece and/ or for use by the greek academic and research community. Currently, there is only one data repository which is OpenAIRE compiant:- Zenodotus: clarin:el inventory of language resources and services
Of course, there are big and domain-specific research communities in Greece such as ELIXIR-GR, APOLLONIS, SODANET, that have developed services, tools and sometimes repositories to better meet the needs of their researchers to manage, store and preserve generated data. Those are being currently used by the respective researchers and research communities in Greece together with more interdisciplinary ones such as the EUDAT CDI facilities.GRNET, the National Infrastructures for Research and Technology, offers cloud computing and has developed services such as AAI for authentication, Handles for identification, IaaS for VMs, Networks and Storage to assist Greek researchers activities.Finally, Athena RC and GRNET are developing the Hellenic Data Service “HELIX” which consists of three main services at the moment:a. a literature aggregator - HELIX Pubsb. a national data repository - HELIX Datac. a digital laboratory with tools for data analysis - HELIX LabHELIX is designed to serve the entire lifecycle of data (intensive) research making use of HPC and HTC capabilities, Virtual machines and cloud computing power. HELIX applies global interoperability standards and is gradually moving to become a FAIR-aligned aligned and certified.HARDMIN is HEAL-Link's data repositories that is now underway. HARDMIN has been developed using HELIX's model and being by default intereperable and interconnected with it.Monitor new OpenAIRE compliant repositories anytime from browsing OpenAIRE Explore.
National publishing initiatives
There are two national publishing iniatives:
- e-publishing journals (National Documentation Center)
- Prothiki (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)
Since 2007 EKT operates a nation-wide institutional ePublishing infrastructure for open access publications, aimed at supporting open access publishing for Greek scholarly institutions, such as universities, scholarly societies, research centers. It collaborates with 30 Greek publishers and operates three platforms, one each for journals, proceedings and open access monographs with an emphasis –but not limited- to SSH.
Similarly, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki offers a publishing platform that hosts Open Access scientific journals published by departments, faculty members and research centers of the University. It supports all stages of the publishing process in an online environment and its content is indexed by well-known search engines.
National agreements with publishers
HEAL-Link has secured access to a number of scientific publishers for years 2019-2021 through Open Access Agreements. All agreements that they made under the provision for open access publications support the publication of articles only in scientific electronic journals. Researchers are advised to read carefully the terms and conditions of publishers prior to selection of the publishing venue.OA books
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Training & Support
There are a number of stakeholders offering research support through informative or training events based on their expertise and area of influence.
Athena RC has initiated and leads a series of webinars on Open Science in greek language in collaboration with the Cypriot NOAD. These events are organised in a monthly basis and have proven to be successful in uniting the academic and research community under the Open Science and the EOSC umbrella. In the context of Athena RC's participation in the NI4OS-Europe project with significant involvement in the trainers network, more training events around Open Research Data Management and EOSC are expected to be delivered at the national level.
More information:
Open Access and Open Science
- Athena Research & Innovation Center
- Hellenic Academic Libraries Link - HEALLink
- University of Patras Library
- The Greek portal for open access
Open Research Software
Open Data
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Statistics
52,599 OA publications in 28 repositories -
News
06 May 2021
Background: In the framework of the NI4OS-Europe project, ATHENA Research and Innovation Center (ATHENA) developed tools that respond to emerging Open and FAIR Research Data Management (RDM) demands of researchers and provide a first set of clarity for EOSC resource providers' compliance with the Rules of Participation (RoP). NI4OS-Europe is the European project that supports the development and i...27 April 2021
Focus: In April, the Greek and Cypriot OpenAIRE NOADs, in collaboration also with the Scholarly Communication Unit of HEAL-Link, organized an event to inform their scientific communities and individual researchers about the newly launched European platform for open access publications, namely the Open Research Europe (ORE). The event welcomed Victoria Tsoukala, Policy Officer-Seconded National Exp...08 March 2021
About: In the framework of established collaboration between OpenAIRE NOADs in Greece and Cyprus, and in support of the NI4OS-Europe project where they both contribute, a webinar was organized to update the Greek and Cypriot scientific community about news from the evolving European Research and Innovation (R&I) area. In brief: Data intensive scientific demands and emerging technologies that a...29 January 2021
In focus: The Greek academic library community was recently enhanced with an Open Science service supported by HEAL-Link. The newly established "Scholarly Communication Unit" aims to provide librarians with information about Open Access (OA) and scholarly communication, such as best practices on research data, scholarly metrics and peer review. It is also assigned to represent the consortium in in...23 December 2020
The focus: Athena Research Center (ARC) continues the series of informative and educational workshops related to important practices, tools and contact points for COVID-19 research in Greece. In December, a joint workshop on Galaxy, the infrastructure for biological data analysis was organised with the Biomedical Sciences Research Center "Alexander Fleming" and the Institute of Applied Biosciences...20 November 2020
Driver: The need to collect all efforts and knowledge in managing the coronavirus crisis and widely promote it to the Greek academic and research community was identified at the very beginning of the pandemic, back in April. As a response, Athena Research & Innovation Center (Athena RC) initiated a series of informative and educational online workshops to support research performed around COVI...
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