European project OpenAIRE 2020 has ended: what was the role of DANS in this project?

Open Science policy EC with regard to Horizon 2020 projects

Researchers who receive funding from Horizon 2020 are obliged to publish the resulting publications with open access. For the associated research data, in the period 2015 – 2017 the researcher was obliged to publish it as open data in certain disciplines, the so-called ‘open data pilot’. From 2017 on, this applies to data sets resulting from the research in all disciplines. In addition, the research data must be published according to the FAIR principles: ‘Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable’.

The researcher is obliged to submit a Data Management Plan within 6 months from the start of the research. For researchers, it is possible to use the opt-out regulation if there are good reasons for not filing the data as open data, for example for privacy and security reasons.

Support OpenAIRE

OpenAIRE supports the researcher, but also the repository managers and research administrators, with these obligations through factsheets, webinars, workshops, FAQs and briefing papers. OpenAIRE also has had the repository Zenodo (managed by CERN) developed, in which researchers can deposit their publications and research data if no other suitable repository is available.

The OpenAIRE network

OpenAIRE is also a technical network and provides access to 22 million publications and 800,000 datasets from 12,000 repositories and Open Access journals. OpenAIRE is also a network of National Open Access Desks (NOADs), a network of contacts for the research community in a European country and the OpenAIRE community.

DANS and OpenAIRE

DANS has carried out a number of tasks in the OpenAIRE project and largely carries these out in the OpenAIRE-Advance follow-up project:

• NOAD Task

DANS is, together with the library of Delft University of Technology, NOAD for the Netherlands. DANS mainly focuses on the research data and TU Delft on the publications. The NOAD promotes open science in the Netherlands through contacts with H2020 research coordinators, repository managers, policy staff and so on. DANS also participates in the editors of openaccess.nl, and is a member of the Dutch Platform for Open Science. In 2018, DANS organized an ‘Open Day on Open Science’ on 21 March and the ‘Monitoring Open Access’ workshop on 23 May.

The national research portal NARCIS, a core service of DANS, harvests the repositories of the universities, KNAW, NWO and other research institutes. NARCIS has been brought into line with the ‘OpenAIRE Guidelines for Literature Repositories‘ (v3.0) and, since then, has been harvested by OpenAIRE. As a result, the open access publications of the Dutch institutions can also be found in OpenAIRE.

• Regional coordinator Research Data Management (RDM) Training and Support

With OpenAIRE 2020 the Open Data Pilot also started: H2020 researchers must also submit their research data as open data in a repository, under the slogan ‘As open as possible, as closed as necessary’. Because of the unfamiliarity with RDM for many NOADs, researchers, repository managers, policy makers, etc. in Europe, a lot of material had to be developed. DANS is the regional coordinator for Research Data Management and Open Data Pilot in Europe. For the NOADs, DANS has developed an RDM support kit, which contains various fact sheets, briefing paper RDM, FAQs, and various webinars. In addition, DANS has given workshops and presentations in various countries regarding the open data pilot and RDM for researchers. DANS has also given various webinars.

• Literature data integration

As part of the ‘Literature-data Integration’ task, DANS has made an inventory of how the ‘linking’ of literature and data for the social sciences and humanities is tackled in all kinds of initiatives.

• Research Impact Services

Together with NWO and OpenAIRE, DANS has ensured that the research projects funded by NWO via text mining are linked to corresponding open access publications from ArXiv, Europe PMC and the OpenAIRE compliant institutional repositories. The result of the text mining is on the OpenAIRE website. In addition, OpenAIRE added charts on NWO publications at the request of DANS.

DANS and OpenAIRE Advance

OpenAIRE 2020 was the successor to two earlier OpenAIRE projects that started in 2009: OpenAIRE and OpenAIRE Plus (in the latter, DANS was also involved). OpenAIRE-Advance is the successor of OpenAIRE 2020 and will run from January 2018 until the end of 2020. With this project, DANS also functions as NOAD with TU Delft’s library and DANS is again regional coordinator RDM Training and Support. Finally, the NARCIS service of DANS is used as an example for the implementation of the new OpenAIRE CRIS/CERIF Guidelines.

More information

For questions and reactions regarding OpenAIRE and NARCIS, please contact Elly Dijk, NOAD OpenAIRE and senior policy officer.