The European Commission (EC) has launched OpenAIRE (Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe) at the University of Ghent in Belgium. Through this, it is expected that EU researchers, businesses and citizens will have free and open access to EU-funded research papers.
OpenAIRE is projected to provide a network of open repositories providing free online access to knowledge produced by scientists receiving grants from the Seventh Framework programme (FP7) and European Research Council (ERC). This would particularly be in the fields of health, energy, environment, parts of information & communication technology and research infrastructures, social sciences, humanities and science in society. This is seen to be an important step towards full and open access to scientific papers that could - for instance - allow patients with rare illnesses to have access to the latest medical research results, or provide scientists with real-time updates about developments in their field.
Developing research infrastructures and e-infrastructures, including those for scientific research results, with a view to boosting Europe's competitiveness, is stated to be a priority of both the Digital Agenda for Europe and of the Innovation Union initiative.
About 2.5 million research articles are reportedly published in 25,000 peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings worldwide every year. Currently, just 15-20 percent of these articles are available in open access repositories or open access journals. The rest are only accessible through pay-per-read schemes or by paying for a subscription to the publication. The EU-funded OpenAIRE could eventually open up access to all scientific papers and data produced by researchers funded by the FP7, including scientists receiving grants through the ERC.
Under the terms of their FP7 grants, researchers who receive EU funding in the fields of health, energy, environment, information & communication technology, research infrastructures, social sciences, humanities and science in society should deposit the full text of their research publications in an open access repository, to be made permanently available worldwide. This is around 20 percent of all projects funded by FP7. Researchers in other fields could also opt to make their texts available in the open access repository.
The project could also lead to new ways of indexing, annotating, ordering and linking research results - and new methods to automate all this. This could trigger the development of new services on top of the information infrastructure which OpenAIRE provides. The project is running a helpdesk in 27 European countries, consisting of a network of experts and a portal of tools helping researchers to make their articles available online.
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