We’re delighted to welcome the announcement that OpenAIRE2020 will start in January next year, and to say that Jisc is a significant partner in this project. OpenAIRE provides an important infrastructure for open research at a European level, complementing many of the services that Jisc offers to UK institutions, and adding value to those services.
Jisc will become the UK National OA Desk (NOAD) from January, which means we’ll be providing support and information to help UK institutions and researchers comply with the EC’s Horizon 2020 programme policies on OA and open data. Jisc, through the Digital Curation Centre, will also have a specific role in OpenAIRE to help support the EC open data pilot.
So far, most UK institutional repositories have not provided information to OpenAIRE in a fully compliant way. With the introduction (soon, I promise!) of the RIOXX metadata profile, we anticipate that this will change, and UK institutions will be harvested by CORE, which will serve as our national aggregation, transforming UK repository records into the OpenAIRE format and making them available to OpenAIRE. So, UK institutional repositories that implement RIOXX will have done all they need to do to interoperate with OpenAIRE. In terms of the support for the H2020 Open Data Pilot there is already a template in the Digital Curation Centre’s Data Management Planning On Line tool, DMPonline – just log in and select H2020 in the funder drop down.
So, in terms of OA, Jisc is a partner in the EC projects OpenAIRE (for infrastructure), PASTEUR4OA (for OA policies) and also note the Digital Curation Centre is in FOSTER (for training). More widely, for example through the 4C project on the costs of curation, the EUDAT initiative on research data, and via initiatives such as the Research Data Alliance, Jisc is taking steps to ensure that the UK’s interests are addressed in EC projects and that the infrastructure being developed therein benefits our customers.
