OpenAIRE invites you to participate in a brief survey on attitudes to Open Peer Review.

Your anonymous answers will be made available to the research and publishing communities to inform future innovations in peer review. 

The survey takes around 15-20 minutes to complete and will remain open until Friday 7th October.

Take the survey now: https://www.soscisurvey.de/OPR/

The European Commission has released new Guidelines on FAIR Data Management in Horizon 2020. There are a few key changes and a new template for DMPs which has been added to DMPonline.

The scope of the Open Research Data pilot has been growing. In the initial 2014-15 work programme, 7 areas were selected to take part. This grew in the 2015-16 work programe, and from 2017 the pilot will be extended to cover all the thematic areas of Horizon 2020, making Open Access to Research Data the default.

More...

Europe’s governments have agreed to common ambitious political Open Science goals for the first time at a gathering of ministers of science, innovation, trade and industry on 26-27 May 2016.

What consequences will taking action on these goals mean?
Who will be the influencers to make it happen?

See the highlights of the agreed goals here.

Thursday 26 May 2016 at 14:00-15:00 CEST

Whether measurements from sensors, results from simulations or interview recordings, modern scholarship generates incredible amounts of digital information which, properly kept and shared, holds the potential to drive new research and innovation. Recognising this, funders are implementing policies for RDM and data sharing, such as the Horizon 2020 Open Research Data Pilot, which aims to improve and maximise access to the research data generated by EU-funded projects. But good data management skills are useful far beyond complying with funder commitments: well-managed data foster good scientific practice and sharing well-formed, well-described data increases research impact.

At the end of the session participants will be able to:

• Articulate the importance of research data management;
• Set clear goals regarding data archiving and sharing (both during and after a project);
• Understand the basic principles of data management, stewardship and archiving;
• Identify appropriate RDM tools and services.

Click here to register.

Are you publishing an APC-free OA journal on a shoestring?

OpenAIRE is hosting a webinar on Thursday, 12 May 2016 at 10:00 CEST where you can learn more about the new OpenAIRE call for proposals to fund APC-free Open Access journals and platforms under the alternative funding mechanism of the FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot.

Besides funding APCs, OpenAIRE would also like to offer a funding opportunity for APC-free OA journals under the EC Gold Open Access Pilot: after all, two thirds of the journals listed in the DOAJ charge no APCs to their authors. Therefore, a call for proposals has been put together that will allow these journals and/or platforms and publishers to apply for funding for improving their publishing workflows along a number of suggested lines.

A maximum of €200,000 will be awarded to up to 12 bids to perform technical improvements on APC-free OA journals such as becoming OpenAIRE compatible, systematically collecting funding information in the article metadata or implementing ORCID. In order to be eligible for funding, such journals must have published (or accepted for publication) eligible articles arising from finished FP7 projects during the last year. 

The call for proposals will remain open until the 30th of June, and bid assessment will be done during the month of July. The selected proposals will be announced in early August and will have until the 30th of April 2017 to carry out the proposed improvements. 

We invite you to join this webinar and learn more about the requirements for applying for funding under this call. The webinar will be led by Pablo de Castro, from LIBER, the coordinating institution for the FP7 Post-Grant OA Pilot, and will address the following topics:

• Timeschedule for this alt-funding initiative
• Requirements for eligibility
• How to submit a funding application

The second part of the webinar will be a Q&A session where questions about this funding initiative will be answered.

Click here to register.

As of Mar 10th, 275 funding requests have already been granted by this pilot to researchers and projects across Europe and beyond, with only 1 having been granted in Luxembourg.

Join the OpenAIRE webinar to be held on Friday 18 March at 11am to learn more about the progress of the FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot.

The webinar will address the following topics and will be followed by a Q&A session:

• How the FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot works;
• How organizations are working with LIBER and OpenAIRE in order to support the Pilot implementation;
• How to use the central service at https://postgrantoapilot.openaire.eu/ for collecting and processing funding requests for Open Access publishing fees;
• What dissemination actions will be carried out next.

Full details and registration link can be found on the OpenAIRE website.

The ORBi^lu team is pleased to announce that a new field has been added which will permit you to group publications by focus area.  This optional field permits you to tag your publication with one or more of the current focus areas of the University.  Once tagged, you can also produce reports based upon this information.  The field is available for all types of documents and is displayed immediately after the "Discipline" field:

If you have any questions, contact us on orbilu@uni.lu.

Toujours un peu perdu avec le concept d'Open Access ?  Cette petite vidéo du Lab'UA (Université d'Angers) de 3,30 minutes pourrait répondre à vos questions.

Une introduction à l'Open Access

Congratulations to The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for further strengthening their support of Open Access.  As of the 1^st December, all publications emerging from a 'call for proposals’ published by NWO after this date must be immediately accessible to everybody from the moment of publication.

Read the full press release.

Interested in publishing an article in an Open Access journal? QOAM allows you to assess the quality of a journal and the cost of publication. QOAM is an initiative of the Dutch Radboud University in Nijmegen. Information about a journal is compiled through a Journal Score Card, consisting of 2 parts:

• Base Score: a questionnaire on four aspects: editorial information, peer evaluation, governance and the publishing process, and
• Valuation Score: assessment by users of the journal, either authors, editors or reviewers peers.

With QOAM you can not only express your experience with a journal as a researcher but also find out more about an OA journal, its quality and cost.