The 8th OpenAIRE workshop took place as part of the RDA Ninth Plenary Meeting, Barcelona, and explored legal hindrances and possible solutions to open up research data. With the presentation of legal studies in making data open and interoperable, lessons learnt from the funders and with a critical understanding of issues related to text and data mining, data privacy and licenses, the event was an excellent opportunity to deepen all these issues.

Few would deny that peer review, as currently practiced, has its drawbacks. It is slow, unaccountable, wasteful of resources, and lacking in incentives yet it is an essential part of the scientific process. A variety of initiatives have set up experiments with different forms of Open Peer Review (OPR) making the process faster and less opaque. But what does it entail and how can it provide better scientific publications? To explore the possibilities of OPR a workshop on “Open Peer Review: Models, Benefits and Limitations”, was held by OpenAIRE in conjunction with The International Conference on Electronic Publishing (Elpub) in Göttingen, June 2016.

The OpenAIRE Workshop on “Sharing research data and open access to publications in Horizon 2020” focused on concepts and good practices of managing Research Data and Open Access to scientific publications in Horizon 2020. This workshop took place at Ghent University on the 18th of November and was attended by 102 delegates from 29 different countries.