Case studies on Open Science in the context of ERC projects - Set 3

This document presents the third of five sets of case studies that have been produced in the framework of the ‘Study on open access to publications and research data management and sharing within ERC projects’. This study has been procured by the ERC Executive Agency under contract number ERCEA/A1/2016/06. 

The following three case studies are included in this set:

• Our Mythical Childhood... The Reception of Classical Antiquity in Children’s and Young Adults’ Culture in Response to Regional and Global Challenges (OurMythicalChildhood)

Professor Katarzyna Marciniak has assembled an international team of researchers to study the intersection of classical antiquity and children’s and young adults’ culture in several regions across the the globe. OurMythicalChildhood is developing an openly accessible supra-regional survey of classical references and engages in a myriad of science communication activities both online and face-to-face. The team is united by the same vision – to share their research results as soon as possible in order to facilitate their dissemination, immediate uptake and further use.

• The Intergenerational Cumulative Disadvantage and Resource Compensation (INDIRECT)

Professor Jani Erola and his team have come to appreciate the benefits of open science practices while working on the ERC project INDIRECT. Professor Erola was not highly aware of open access issues before receiving his Consolidator Grant in 2013. Currently his team aims to ensure open access to articles and books as much as possible and have also set up an online platform to disseminate their working papers while they are undergoing peer review. These approaches provide opportunities for the team to generate greater interest in their work and achieve a wider impact through their published works.

• Computational models for the discovery of the world's music (CompMusic)

In the CompMusic project, Professor Xavier Serra’s Music Technology Group used an ERC Advanced Grant to develop their open science practices in a manner that helped answer their research questions, and enhance the opportunities for commercialisation of the results. Their research is interdisciplinary, developing computational approaches to support the scholarly analysis of music. CompMusic was particularly focused on five non-Western musical traditions and developed a software framework for data analysis. Lacking research data repositories and standards specialised for this relatively new domain, the Group constructed an approach that combines locally engineered open source software frameworks and open data collections. These are managed and shared across a variety of community databases. Through user-provided content and usage the open collections help with software enhancements. Using a dual-licensing model, the software can then be commercialised and generate income streams from subscribers, while also being made available under open source licenses for non-commercial use.