OpenAIRE and the STARS EU University Alliance have entered into a collaboration to support Open Science practices, improve research visibility, and enable evidence-based decision-making across the alliance. The partnership provides STARS EU with a dedicated OpenAIRE CONNECT Gateway and MONITOR Dashboard to support a unified view of research activities and outputs across member institutions.
The collaboration enables STARS EU to discover, analyze, and assess research outputs from all member universities. Consolidating outputs into a shared environment is intended to address fragmentation between institutions and support alignment with Open Science strategies, research visibility, and collaboration.
The CONNECT Gateway serves as a public-facing portal aggregating research outputs from STARS EU members. The MONITOR Dashboard provides evidence-based insights into Open Access trends, collaboration levels, policy alignment, and thematic contributions to support strategic planning at institutional and alliance levels.
Together, these services enable STARS EU to:
● Visualize research outputs across institutions
● Track Open Science adoption and policy alignment
● Identify collaboration patterns and multidisciplinary areas
● Support reporting to stakeholders, funders, and society
● Enable data-informed governance
The CONNECT Gateway and MONITOR Dashboard are powered by the OpenAIRE Graph, a scholarly communication database that links research outputs with projects, funders, researcher identifiers, and institutions. The database is continuously updated and designed to support interoperable research information.
The partnership aligns with STARS EU priorities related to digital infrastructure, Open Science policies, and research dissemination. STARS EU conducted a joint public tender for a shared infrastructure platform and selected OpenAIRE based on scientific, technical, and governance requirements.
The collaboration was launched on 2 December 2025 following completion of the kick-off meeting. During this milestone, the customized CONNECT Gateway and MONITOR Dashboard were delivered to support all nine partner universities under a shared infrastructure.
From early 2026, the partnership entered an implementation and refinement phase focused on configuring data sources, curating institutional records, and Open Science workflows. OpenAIRE will provide training on CONNECT, MONITOR, and data curation, as well as guidance on repository onboarding and dashboard management.
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