OpenAIRE (Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe)

OpenAIRE promotes practices aimed at enabling the stakeholders involved to make science useful for themselves, for their working environments, and to transform society through validated scientific knowledge.

OpenAIRE is a pan-European, non-profit, community-driven initiative that promotes policies, infrastructures, and services for Open Science in Europe and beyond. It originated as a European Commission–funded project under FP7, under the name “Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe (OpenAIRE)”, and has since evolved into a permanent structure. Today, it operates through the legal entity OpenAIRE A.M.K.E. and a network of member organizations (universities, infrastructures, funders, etc.), supported by the National Open Access Desks (NOADs), which act as national nodes.

Align policies: foster scientific dialogue for effective Open Science implementation by engaging Open Access and Open Science experts in a network of national roundtables.

Provide Open Science services: deliver interoperability services to embed Open Science into researchers’ workflows.

Link research: develop common global standards to connect research outputs (data, publications, software) with their creators (researchers, institutions, and funders), thereby improving discoverability, transparency, reproducibility, and quality assurance in research.

Monitor Open Science: promote transparency in assessing research impact by creating a European information system that brings research together and enables reporting, monitoring, and analysis.

Train for Open Science: promote cultural change towards Open Science through training activities for trainers, researchers, content providers, and policymakers.

Build global bridges: connect Europe to the global open research landscape through similar international initiatives, with the aim of sharing policies and common access protocols for research outputs—ultimately supporting the transition to an open and effective global research ecosystem.

Facilitate Open Science: foster innovation in open scholarly communication services by making research information freely available so that external providers can create value-added services and support a better understanding of scientific knowledge.

Researchers, research coordinators, and policymakers at the local level.

OpenAIRE encompasses a series of European Commission–funded projects, each delivering specific results for every phase, starting with DRIVER, its first initiative in 2006.

DRIVER (2006–2009): created a network of digital repositories in ten European countries. It enabled a production-quality digital repository infrastructure and led to the establishment of COAR (the Confederation of Open Access Repositories).

OpenAIRE (2008–2011): provided the means to promote and achieve the widespread adoption of Open Access policy, as set out by the ERC Scientific Council Guidelines for Open Access and the Open Access (OA) pilot launched by the European Commission (EC).

OpenAIRE Plus (2012–2015): the NOAD network expanded to 31 countries, contributing (at a global level) to the development of common standards and solutions to data and interoperability challenges. The outcomes of this stage not only helped expand the repository network, but also strengthened collaboration with domain-specific data providers in scientific areas that support the management of, and interconnection between, research data.

OpenAIRE 2020 (2015–2018): within Horizon 2020, OpenAIRE implemented and monitored activities for an EC Open Data Pilot. It promoted open scholarship involving professionals from 50 institutions in 33 European countries. In collaboration with LIBER, it also developed novel methods for scholarly review and publishing, as well as a study and a pilot on research indicators related to Open Access.

OpenAIRE-Connect (2015–2018): its two main contributions were the deployment of two services:

• Research Community Dashboard: to publish research-specific development methods or processes (packages and links) and monitor their impact on research.
• Catch-All Notification Broker: based on notifications of new research methods and processes, it mobilizes content providers and offers services that enable exchange, supporting their transition towards Open Science paradigms.

OpenAIRE-Advance (2018–2020): focusing on empowering its National Open Access Desks by positioning Open Access and Open Science on national agendas, OpenAIRE improved and consolidated its range of services and products into a common catalogue. It also expanded collaborations with Latin America, the United States, Japan, Canada, and Africa.

OpenAIRE-Nexus (2021–2023): in this current phase, the project offers tools to libraries and research communities to make their content more visible and discoverable, and to increase research and innovation potential.

Key project challenges include:

• Responding to the ongoing transformation of the scholarly communication landscape and addressing, in a timely manner, the needs of different research environments.
• Securing funding to sustain the range of services.
• Addressing the heterogeneous research ecosystem when fostering technical interoperability across territorial or thematic networks.

After 21 years of continuous activity, the project’s success in engaging more than 65 European universities, research centres, and other institutions from over 35 countries in an open scientific dialogue demonstrates its ability to communicate the importance of supporting a coordinated transition to Open Science. In addition, its dashboard reports results such as:

• 124 million publications
• 83k research software records linked to publications
• 882k datasets linked to publications

Moreover, although the project was initially developed within Europe, it has already incorporated countries from other regions and aims to achieve a global territorial reach, involving institutions in Latin America, the United States, Japan, Canada, and Africa. Likewise, the different phases of the projects developed to date increasingly incorporate services that respond to the needs of diverse research environments.

• OpenAire: https://www.openaire.eu/