In support of Open Access, the European Commission has launched a pilot initiative to ensure that the research publications from FP7-funded research in several fields, as well as all European Research Council (ERC)-funded research, must be made Open Access within six months from date of publication. To support this drive, they opened a call for a European-wide infrastructure to ensure that European researchers indeed have Open Access repositories available to them, and that their papers are linked to the EC funding source. The result of this call was a new European project called OpenAIRE (Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe) that came into existence on 1 December 2009. This pilot project will run for 36 months until the end of FP7 and is a joint effort between 38 partners from around Europe.
OpenAIRE's objectives
• Build support structures for researchers in depositing FP7 research publications through the establishment of the European helpdesk and the outreach to all European member states through the operation and collaboration of 27 national Open Access liaison offices.
• Establish and operate an electronic infrastructure for handling peer-reviewed articles as well as other important forms of publications (pre-prints or conference publications). This is achieved through a portal that is the gateway to all user-level services offered by the e-infrastructure, including access (search and browse) to scientific publications and other value-added functionality (post-authoring tools, monitoring tools through analysis of document and usage statistics).
• Work with several subject communities to explore the requirements, practices, incentives, work flows, data models and technologies to deposit, access and otherwise manipulate research data sets of various forms in combination with research publications.
The OpenAIRE portal will be the central place for EC-funded researchers and other collaborators to deposit their documents and data, or to announce their existence in any institutional or subject repository. In doing so, the authors and their project will gain visibility and ensure that their work can contribute to the benefit of Europe (and thanks to Open Access, to everybody). In addition the EC will have a powerful tool to monitor and evaluate the performance of the different projects it is funding and their compliance with the Open Access mandate.
The back-end of the OpenAIRE portal will be built on top of two software packages – D-NET and Invenio.
D-NET is the software infrastructure that has been built as an outcome of the DRIVER project (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research), "a multi-phase effort whose vision and primary objective is to establish a cohesive, pan-European infrastructure of digital repositories, offering sophisticated functionality services to researchers and the general public." (From the DRIVER portal).
Invenio is CERN's Integrated Digital Library software, which is already used to serve the CERN Document Server, the soon to be released INSPIRE, the EPFL InfoScience Portal and others, and will soon power the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS).
Invenio is an integrated repository designed to allow the depositing, harvesting, organization and dissemination of knowledge in the form of documents and their metadata (e.g. title, authorship information, abstract, keywords, etc). It offers an enhanced search engine and collaborative tools, such as baskets (to share your findings with colleagues), alerts (so you can stay up to date with recent publications in your area of interest), comments/review (for collaborative production) and much more.
As part of OpenAIRE, CERN is hosting and maintaining the OpenAIRE Orphan Records Repository, which is the OpenAIRE special repository for all publications without an existing institutional or subject repository.
Because it is based on Invenio, this repository will provide the OpenAIRE architecture with all of the advanced features that we have available today, such as automatic reference extraction from publications, optical character recognition of scanned documents, metadata curating tools, automatic keyword/classification management tools. In addition, because this is a new use case for Invenio, the software development and advancements driven by the needs of the OpenAIRE project will in turn be available to all of the Invenio users, including all of the CERN Document Server users – a truly win-win situation.
Invenio is one of the key software packages behind OpenAIRE and recently joined D4ScienceII – another European project – proving that it has become a mature and trustworthy project, contributing to CERN's transfer of technologies and knowledge as well as to the dissemination of science worldwide.
Useful links
Invenio: http://cdsware.cern.ch/invenio/
CERN Document Server: http://cdsweb.cern.ch/
DRIVER: www.driver-community.eu/
OpenAIRE Portal: www.openaire.eu/
OpenAIRE Orphan Record Repository: http://openaire.cern.ch/