Implementing open access mandates in Europe

Abstract

The Openaire project supports the implementation of Europe’s open ac-cess policies as outlined in the European Research Council’s Guidelines for Open Access and the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme (fp7) Open Access Pilot. This work highlights existing open access policies in Europe and pro-vides an overview of publishers’ self-archiving policies. It also highlights the strategies needed to implement these policies. It provides a unique overview of national awareness of open access in 32 European countries involving all eu member states and in addition, Norway, Iceland, Croatia, Switzerland and Turkey. Moreover, it describes funder and institutional open access mandates in Europe and national strategies to introduce and implement them. An overview is provided of the repository infrastructure currently in place in European countries, including institutional and disci-plinary repositories, national repository networks and national open ac-cess information portals and support networks. There are robust regional and national networks of open access advo-cates representing libraries and some research discipline communities. More than half of the European countries covered in this work have al-ready established national repository infrastructures. In some of these countries, the fp7 Open Access Pilot was the catalyst for discussions about funders’ open access policies and the development of national re-search infrastructures (e.g. in Bulgaria, Estonia and Slovenia). In its efforts to reach out to research institutions, researchers, project co-ordinators and publishers in the individual European countries, Open -aire is facilitated by a network of National Open Access Desks (noads). The noads also provide support to institutions in developing their open access policies: in implementing the European Commission’s Open Ac-cess Pilot and the erc’s Guidelines on Open Access, in building synergies within institutional open access policies, and in making repositories and open access journals compliant with Openaire’s requirements for meta-data harvesting (as laid out in the Openaire Guidelines). 11 Among the outreach and dissemination strategies tried thus far, some have already been identified as particularly successful. These include the early outreach to researchers (i.e. when a fp7-funded project is launched), the active involvement of fp7 National Contact Points (ncps), personal interaction with repository managers and the sharing of success stories to encourage new developments. The main issues that still need to be re-solved in the coming years include the effective promotion of open access among research communities and support in copyright management for researchers and research institutions as well as intermediaries such as li-braries and repositories. This work also outlines the continuation project, Openaireplus which aims to grow the scope of Openaire in terms of open access publications, and in addition connect these publications to other contextual informa-tion, such as research data and funding information. Opportunities for Openaire to cooperate with other stakeholders in order to achieve Euro-pean and global synergies are also highlighted. Such stakeholders include research communities and/or publishers, the international Confederation of Open Access Repositories (coar), the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (sparc) Europe, Electronic Information for Li-braries (eifl), unesco, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), international oa publishers, disciplinary scholarly societies and young re-searchers’ organisations.