OpenAIRE: the Open Science Pillar of the EOSC

Since 2009, OpenAIRE has been serving research communities around Europe by facilitating the compliance to the EC’s mandates on Open Access and Open Science. With more than 30 mi publications (and 1,5 mi research data and 100k software) available through its portal and APIs, OpenAIRE is an essential resource in the Open Science landscape providing access and research sharing and building advanced services on top of the data collected in the OpenAIRE infrastructure. Our current efforts are focused on re-designing and enhancing OpenAIRE’ services via a set of dashboards. Each of them is serving specific stakeholders (Content Providers, Research Communities, Research Funders, and Institutions) and is aiming to include Open Science in research and research administration workflows. These services provide a rich set of open scholarly outputs, from publications, that also encompasses grey literature, to research organizations and project information.

The OpenAIRE service infrastructure harvests metadata about scholarly communication products (literature, datasets, software, and other research products) and links between such products from a range of institutional or subject repositories, national and institutional research information portals, aggregators, e-journals, data repositories, and software repositories. In addition, it infers links between literature and such products via advanced text and data mining techniques. The resulting information graph is intended to favor monitoring of open science (e.g. science reproducibility and transparent research assessment).

OpenAIRE is one of the key pillars in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), representing the “O” in this context. In fact, through the network of National Open Access Desks all over the European countries. OpenAIRE contributes to the implementation and alignment of policies and guidelines on and for Open Science in Europe and beyond. Through this, OpenAIRE connects Open Science in Europe and around the world.

Means of shaping Open Science in the framework of the EOSC also pass through the training activities OpenAIRE organises periodically on various topics, from the basics about the compliance to EC’s mandates on Open Access and Open Science to those on Data Management and related legal issues to the technical ones on how to become an OpenAIRE content provider and use the available services.