A few thoughts on OA Monitoring and CRISs (I) | euroCRIS | Pablo de Castro

"In the wake of the AT2OA workshop on Open Access monitoring to be imminently held in Vienna, the post looks into recent attempts to coordinate the various national-level initiatives that are taking place in the area and suggests some possible prerequisites for this international endeavour to be able to succeed. It also argues that a successful OA monitoring in the pioneering countries should pave the way for other ones to eventually follow for their own progress assessment needs.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           A European Council statement was issued in May 2016 aiming to achieve full Open Access to research outputs by 2020. This was hailed at the time as a major step forwards in the push to widen access to the results of publicly-funded research. Nearly two years later there's a generalised awareness of the difficulty to reach this political goal across the EU by the proposed deadline. This should however not stop the efforts to achieve further progress and to improve the way Open Access is being implemented – this 100% Open Access objective is clearly achievable in specific countries that will then to some extent provide a best practice approach.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    One of the areas where more work needs to be done is the actual monitoring of the progress in Open Access implementation. This has been on the cards for some time now, since national roadmaps with specific milestones and deadlines for reaching this 100% Open Access started to be produced quite a long time before the European Council meeting itself was held. This national-level discussions have resulted in a number of initiatives to monitor Open Access that are being implemented in different countries. The Knowledge Exchange, that brings together stakeholders like the Jisc in the UK, the DFG in Germany, SURF in the Netherlands, DEFF in Denmark or CSC in Finland, have taken a particularly relevant role in the past couple of years in ensuring that the various national-level approaches to Open Access monitoring would have the opportunity to discuss the progress with each other at a number of workshops...."