OpenAIRE & EGI: open access to the future

"EGI provides innovative and scalable ICT services to help scientists to meet the challenge of data deluge. With more than 21,000 users, EGI is already supporting innovative research across Europe in many fields of science, from High Energy Physics to Medicine. With EGI's relevance as a service provider established, the next step is to demonstrate its scientific impact by tracking all research achievements made possible thanks to EGI services. Collecting scientific outputs and making them available in a public, Open Access repository is a crucial to keep the funding streams required for a sustainable e-infrastructure. This vision is aligned with the European Commission's drive to promote Open Access (OA) – free of charge online access to publications, data and scientific information. The Commission proposes to make open access to scientific publications a general principle of Horizon 2020 as a means to improve knowledge transfer. Open Access accelerates innovation by giving citizens earlier access to scientific output. It improves efficiency by enabling earlier detection of duplication of effort. And contributes to the involvement of citizens and society by making the scientific process more transparent thus fostering collaboration. The OpenAIRE project was set-up by the European Commission to create a single Open Access point to all publications and data so to increase accessibility, use and re-use. The OpenAIRE portal connects a growing number of repositories for publications, making them accessible from a single point OpenAIRE offers EGI a great opportunity to comply with the open access policy and, at the same time, to develop a process to track scientific output. For this reason, EGI will collaborate with OpenAIRE to implement a vision of an Open Access portal linking scientific publications to infrastructures. Researchers will be asked to cite EGI in their publications. This will allow OpenAIRE to automatically detect the link with EGI, opening up new ways to evaluate scientific impact. Last week, I presented the idea of using the OpenAIRE service to fulfil the requirements of EGI. This has been well received by the audience and I believe it can set the path for other infrastructures to follow. This activity is linked to the outcome of the Scientific Publications Repository project which recommendations have been recently adopted by the EGI Council. During the next EGI Community Forum, we expect to announce the new service that should lead to better demonstrating the scientific impact of EGI that will make research outputs more easily accessible to the whole European Research Area and citizens at large."