... Formally embracing the open access ethic, the European Commission has decided to require that results from research it funds in some fields — such as health, energy, environment, information and communication technologies, research infrastructures, social sciences and humanities — become freely available. Authors will deposit a copy of their articles in a “digital repository,” a kind of electronic library accessible through the Web.
While many institutions or subjects have their own, pre-existing repositories for published documents, these are not comprehensively linked and searchable. And some institutions hosting EC-funded researchers are without digital libraries for keeping research papers.
Stepping in to provide this open access e-infrastructure is the OpenAIRE project, which will be launched on the first of December, 2009. The project will run for three years in its first phase. OpenAIRE’s proposal, with a budget of about €5 million, was approved in September after the EC put out a call for a project that would create the e-Infrastructure to disseminate scientific results to anyone, anywhere, at anytime.
Researchers approaching OpenAIRE with a document will first be directed to the repository of their home institute, if one exists. If the researcher is in a discipline which has a repository structure for the entire discipline (the high energy physics community, for example, frequently uses arXiv.org) they will be directed there. If the document is still without a home, the researcher will use an “orphan” repository, hosted at CERN, which will provide everyone a chance to submit their results — which would otherwise be lost.
OpenAIRE technology is based on two technologies: DNET, developed by the DRIVER consortium, will connect the existing repositories, while the orphan repository technology is based on Invenio, a digital library software that has been developed by the CERN Document Server team in the IT department at CERN over the past 15 years — serving the basis for CDS. Other partners, about 35 in total, will provide service help to users. OpenAIRE will therefore be not just a technical infrastructure, but a human one as well.
“Ideally, each researcher will have a help desk in their own member state,” says Salvatore Mele, Open Access Project Leader at CERN, also working for OpenAIRE. ...
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 11/25/2009 03:25:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
