Pilar Rico-Castro, PhD, serves as the Coordinator of the Open Science Unit at the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) and is an associate lecturer at the National Distance Education University (UNED). She earned her PhD in Government and Public Administration from the Complutense University of Madrid in 2006.

Pilar supports the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities in the design, implementation, and evaluation of both national and European R&D&I public policies. At the national level, she is an integral member of the National Open Science Committee (COS), where she contributed to the design and drafting of the National Open Science Strategy (ENCA). Additionally, she coordinates key initiatives for the ENCA deployment such as the  Open Science Public Funding Call (María de Guzman L2), the National Scientific Journals Assessment Process, the National Digital Platform for Academic Publishing RECYT, and the National Open Access Repositories Aggregator RECOLECTA.

Internationally, Pilar is the Spanish Delegate at the European Commission’s National Points of Reference (NPR) for Scientific Information Expert Group, at the EOSC Steering Board Expert Group, and at the Council for National Open Science Coordination (CoNOSC). She is also a national expert on the Horizon Europe Programme Committee for Research Infrastructures.

Furthermore, she represents FECYT in various organizations such as OPERAS, the European Diamond Capacity Hun (EDCH), OpenAIRE AMKE, the Federated Network of Institutional Repositories of Scientific Publications LA Referencia, and the Confederation of Open Access Repositories COAR.

She has participated in several FP7 and H2020 projects, such as OpenAIRE (2009-2012), OpenAIREplus (2011-2014), OpenAIRE2020 (2015-2018), OpenAIRE Advance (2018-2020), the MedOANet project (2011-2013), PASTEUR4OA (2014-2016) EOSC-Future (2021-2024), DIAMAS (2022-2025), and OSTrails (2024-2027). Currently, she plays a significant role ALMASI (2025-2027) Horizon Europe project.

Her areas of expertise are R&D public policies, open science, open access to scientific information, diamond OA publishing, OA repositorioes, open infrastructures.