European Commission grants substantial funding to improve institutional publishing for science

The project “Creating a Robust Accessible Federated Technology for Open Access” (CRAFT-OA), carried out by 23 experienced partners from 14 European countries, coordinated by the University of Göttingen, Germany will start in January 2023 and run for 36 months. Funded within the Horizon Europe Framework Programme (HORIZON Europe), the project aims to equally evolve and strengthen the Diamond Open Access (Diamond OA, no fees towards authors or readers) institutional publishing landscape. By offering tangible services and tools for the entire life cycle of journal publishing CRAFT OA empowers local and regional platforms and service providers to upscale, professionalise and reach stronger interoperability with other scientific information systems for content and platforms. These developments will help researchers and editors involved in publishing.

The project focuses on four strands of action to improve the  Diamond OA model: (1) Provide technical improvements for journal platforms and journal software (2) Build communities of practice to foster overall infrastructure improvement (3) Increase visibility, discoverability and recognition for Diamond OA publishing (4) Integrate Diamond OA publishing with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and other large-scale data aggregators. Consortium partners in CRAFT-OA bring their long-standing engagement in institutional publishing and infrastructure and are committed to sustaining and developing capacities in the field. CRAFT-OA will deliver technical tools, training events, training materials, information, and services for the Diamond OA institutional publishing environment. It will foster communities of practice with the capacity to sustain the project improvements over time.

Margo Bargheer, CRAFT-OA Coordinator, University of Göttingen:

There are countless engaged open access journals out there, making a point to offer Diamond Open Access options to their communities. With our project, they will benefit from shared developments and shared services, but most of all from shared knowledge around professional institutional publishing and stronger networks to reach resilience within their own operation.

EU-Projects support scholarly publishing

CRAFT-OA is linked with other European projects supporting Diamond Open Access, especially the 3-years DIAMAS project (Developing Institutional Open Access Publishing Models to Advance Scholarly Communication). As CRAFT-OA mainly supports Diamond Open Access publishing by providing a technology update, the DIAMAS project supports Diamond Open Access on a non-technical level by building up a capacity centre and a community. The PALOMERA project (Policy Alignment of Open Access Monographs in the European Research Area) investigates institutional scholarly communication as well. Still, it concentrates on contrary to journals on books and especially policies for books. It launches in January 2023 and will run for two years.

Consortium and skills

CRAFT-OA’s 23 consortium partners from 14 European countries are all engaged in institutional publishing and infrastructure, and committed to sustaining and developing capacities in the field. A wide variety of skills and expertise is represented via the consortium partners participating in the project: 

• UGOE, University of Göttingen, DE
• OPERAS, the OPERAS Research Infrastructure, BE
• TSV, the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies, FI
• MWS, the Max Weber Stiftung, DE
• TIB, the Technische Informationsbibliothek, DE 
• SRCE, the University of Zagreb Computing Centre, HR
• UC, the University of Coimbra, PT
• MU, the Masaryk University, CZ
• ESF, the European Science Foundation, FR
• ZRC SAZU, the Scientific Research Centre of Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, SI
• OpenAIRE AMKE, GR
  • ARC, Athena Research Centre, GR (affiliated)
  • CNR, National Research Council of Italy, IT (affiliated)
• UBERN, the University Bern, CH (associated)
• UNITO, the University Turin, IT
• EGI, Stichting EGI, NL
  • National Infrastructures for Research and Technology, GR (affiliated)
• the University Zadar, HR
• IBL PAN, Instytut Badan Literackich Polskiej Akademii Nauk, PL 
• Hamburg State and University Library (Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg), DE 
• UNIWARSAW, the University Warsaw, PL 
• AMU, the Aix-Marseille Université, FR 
• DOAJ, Infrastructure Services for Open Access C.I.C., UK

For more information please contact the coordinator Margo Bargheer, bargheer[a]sub.uni-goettingen.de