Countries

Greece

Research in Greece is carried out primarily by Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) and Research Centers (RC). As of 2019, HEIs activities fall under the supervision of the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs and RCs are supervised by the General Secretariat of Research and Technology (GSRT) of the Ministry of Development and Investments.

Initiatives

There are two national initiatives for Open Science at the moment in Greece:

  • The General Secretariat of Research and Technology (GSRT) Working Group to support GSRT with the development of a national strategy on Open Science. (top-down) The goals are:
    • to map the current situation at national and European level and the necessary measure for formulating a national OS strategy aligned with the ERA roadmap and other related documents,
    • to present to the GSRT proposals regarding the potential involvement of other stakeholders at a later stage.
  • The National Open Science Task Force consisted of representatives from 25 national academic and research institutions, research infrastructures, national nodes and Open Science initiatives. (bottom-up)

The task force has worked to draft a National Open Science Plan which is going to be released for public consultation in 2020. The initiative started as a bottom-up approach and is now supported by the General Secretariat of Research and Technology.

Policy

Greece has not implemented a national Open Access/ Open Science policy yet.

There are ongoing efforts by the National Open Science Task Force that worked to produce a National Open Science Plan. The plan includes provisions for open access to scientific outputs produced from publicly funded streams and for better access to and FAIR-aligned infrastructures and services also according to EOSC standards and rules of participation as they are coming. It also proposes a roadmap for implementation.

Open Access policies are at a nascent stage in Greece, but there are intensive efforts by OpenAIRE Greek NOADs to change the current situation. HEAL-Link and Athena Research Center produced a model Open Science policy template for Greek HEIs. The Greek model policy was developed based on the OpenAIRE policy templates which were modified according to the needs of the national academic library community as identified in a landscape review on policy and technical readiness. The Greek model policy has been presented to academic librarians to foster discussions and get feedback before being finalised.

Training

There are a number of stakeholders offering research support through informative or training events based on their expertise and area of influence, from discipline-specific through research infrastructure networks such as ELIXIR-GR, APOLLONIS, SODANET to more generic practices through public organisations and the OpenAIRE Greek NOADs.

Athena RC has initiated and leads a series of webinars on Open Science in Greek language in collaboration with the Cypriot NOAD. These events are organised on a monthly basis and have proven to be successful in uniting the academic and research community under the Open Science and the EOSC umbrella. In the context of Athena RC’s participation in the NI4OS-Europe project with significant involvement in the trainers network, more training events around Open Research Data Management and EOSC are expected to be delivered at the national level.

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Germany

Support and Landscape

The major research funder in Germany is the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) which has tied open access into its funding policy:

“When entering into publishing contracts scientists participating in DFG-funded projects should, as far as possible, permanently reserve a non-exclusive right of exploitation for electronic publication of their research results for the purpose of open access. Here, discipline-specific delay periods of generally six to twelve months can be agreed upon, before which publication of previously published research results in discipline-specific or institutional electronic archives may be prohibited.”

The DFG also offers a number of funding schemes aimed at enabling open access publication (Open Access Publishing Programme) and the development and implementation of open access infrastructure (Infrastructure for Electronic Publications and Digital Scholarly Communication Programme).

National Initiatives

Open-Access.Network: The platform open-access.net will be developed into a new infrastructure for information and networking. The German Federal Ministry of Education and Research is funding the Germany-wide joint project open-access.network. The project creates a new information and networking service that will activate existing initiatives and network them across regions as well as sustainably improve the exchange within science on Open Access. Information on Open Access will be made available centrally and reliably across disciplines. New, freely accessible material, continuing education and training programmes qualify actors and multipliers in science and libraries and impart skills in practical, organizational and legal issues. All six project partners have been very active contributors to the Open Access community for many years: Communication, Information, Media Centre (KIM) at the University of Konstanz (project manager), Open Access Office Berlin at Freie Universität Berlin, Helmholtz Open Science Office at Helmholtz-Zentrum Potsdam – Deutsches Geoforschungszentrum, German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) in Hannover, university library Bielefeld and university library Göttingen.

Network of certified Open Access repositories and related projects: In order to increase the worldwide perception and effect of the German Research contribution, the project “Network of certified Open Access Repositories” OA-Network seeks to intensify the national networking of repositories. It aims to virtually integrate all document and publication services with a DINI certificate and to increase the number of DINI certified repositories. These certified repositories easily blend in overall networks such as the DRIVER pan-European repository infrastructure (Repositories Infrastructure Vision for European Research). Networking will not only be pushed forward organisationally but also technically and infrastructurally.

New since 2019: National Agreements with Publishers

Project DEAL: Project DEAL is an initiative by the Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany. Its goal is to negotiate and conclude nationwide license agreements with major academic publishers for their entire range of ejournals. Changes in prices and availability of content shall be made to reduce costs and use institutions’ financial capacities more efficiently as well as expand access for academics to academic literature including some sort of Open Access. The involvement of 268 German universities and research institutions as well as state libraries raises hopes that new contracts will be negotiated and changes made. The negotiations started in 2016 and concentrate on the three biggest publishers on the German market: Elsevier, Springer Nature and Wiley. As press releases state, negotiations with Elsevier prove to be unsuccessful. Although around 300 institutions have cancelled their contracts with Elsevier, no consensus could be reached so far and negotiations have been temporarily adjourned in July 2018. In January 2019, a deal with Wiley has been achieved resulting in the first Publish and Read (PAR) contract with German institutions. The PAR fee is calculated yearly on the basis of publications per institution and allows all submitting corresponding authors of participating institutions to publish open access (generally under CC-BY) in all of Wiley’s ejournals at no further cost, as well as a 20% discount on Article Processing Charges for Wiley’s gold open access journals. The contract also includes perpetual access to all 1.700 Wiley ejournals. Very similar conditions apply to the contract with Springer Nature published in January 2020. Since then it is possible for all submitting corresponding authors of participating institutions to publish open access under CC-BY in almost all of Springer Nature’s ejournals with a PAR fee paid by the institutions. The second part of the contract, addressing publications in Springer Nature’s gold open access journals at a 20% discount will be valid from August 2020.

Source and further information: https://www.projekt-deal.de/about-deal/

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France

France has played an important role in the European open access movement, particularly in the launch of the Berlin declaration.
Among French research structures, the research institutions (CNRS, INSERM in particular) played a major role at the beginning of the 2000’s, especially with the launch of the HAL open archive in 2001.

France has a national plan for the implementation of Open Science.

In addition to that, many initiatives have been taken nationally and at the institutional level to support OA:

  • In October 2016, the French Law for a Digital Republic Act (LOI n° 2016-1321 du 7 octobre 2016 pour une République numérique) came into force. One article is of specific concern for scholarly communication, as it relates directly to open access/open data. Article 30 is about Open Access and creates a new right for researchers which creates a legal right for authors to archive an OA copy, even if they have granted an exclusive right to a publisher. See the details here: https://blogs.openaire.eu/?p=1602
  • The Jussieu Call for Open science and bibliodiversity was launched in October 2017 and already signed by many major institutions.

23 French institutions have open access mandates requiring that authors self-archive their papers in their own institutional repository.

The ANR has issued an open access policy in November 2007, strongly encouraging the deposit of funded publications in open archives systems and in HAL in particular. It is worth noting that the Humanities and Social Sciences department has adopted a stronger policy mandating systematic deposit of publications in HAL-SHS.

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Finland

The evaluation of the openness of Finnish research organisations, research-funding organisations, academic and cultural institutes abroad and learned societies and academies, completed by the Ministry of Education and Culture to assess the openness of operational cultures and to evaluate progress for the organisations evaluated in previous years. Results of the evaluation are published in Atlas of open science and research in Finland 2019: Evaluation of openness in the activities of higher education institutions, research institutes, research-funding organisations, Finnish academic and cultural institutes abroad and learned societies and academies.

The Finnish research community has jointly created a Declaration for Open Science and Research. The declaration was approved by the National Open Science and Research Steering Group on 10th of December, 2019.

The declaration provides a common direction for the development of the research community. The declaration outlines a vision, where open science and research are seamlessly integrated into researchers’ everyday work. The joint mission is to promote openness as a fundamental value of science, to strengthen the relevance of research in society and to increase the mobility and impact of research. The declaration defines four objectives that specify how openness will become part of the daily life of researchers and scientists. The goals are defined by the research community for

  • research culture
  • open access to research publications
  • open access to research data and methods, and
  • open education and educational resources as promoted by the research community.

The declaration is available in English, Finnish and Swedish.

Most of the EOSC-related activities in Finland are listed on the CSC website.

There are several Finnish representatives in the EOSC Working Groups:

Landscape

  • Iiris Liinamaa, CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd.
  • Anu Märkälä, CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd.
  • Susanna Nykyri, Tampere University

FAIR

  • Juuso Marttila, Open Science Centre of University of Jyväskylä

Architecture

  • Ville Tenhunen, EGI Foundation

Rules of Participation

  • Pirjo-Leena Forsström, CSC IT Center for Science

Skills & Training

  • Anne Maarit Sunikka, Aalto University

Sustainability

  • Henriikka Mustajoki, The Federation of Finnish Learned Societies

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Czech Republic

National Open Access Policy

The national Open Access policy is handled by the Governmental Office for Science, Research and Innovations (The Office). On February 28, 2014, Recommendations for Open Access issued by the Working Committee for Open Access chaired by professor Haňka were approved by the Office. The Committee recommends to adopt a Czech National Open Access Strategy in correspondence to the European Commission Recommendation on access to and preservation of scientific information.

According to these policies:

1. Research organizations should:

  • cooperate on formulating and adopting national OA policy,
  • support an implementation of institutional repositories to archive research outputs and open data,
  • define responsibilities for researchers in terms of Open Access publishing.

2. Funding agencies should require open access to research output supported by public budget.

On June 14, 2017, the Czech National Strategy for Open Access to Research Information for 2017–2020 has been approved by the Government of the Czech Republic. The resolution commits the Deputy Prime Minister for the Science, Research and Innovation to work out an Action Plan for the Czech National Strategy for Open Access to Research Information by December 31, 2017.

On 29 April 2019, the Czech Government approved an Action Plan for the Implementation of the National Strategy of the Czech Republic’s Open Access to Scientific Information for 2017–2020.

 

There is a vivid community around Open Access topics based under the Initiative of Open Access of Assoc. of Libraries of Czech Universities. The initiative works for now as the main supporter. There is also a newly established working group of „Open Access/Open Science Managers“ under this initiative, that should meet regularly and share practical knowledge about the implementation of Open Access/Open Science at their institutions. This working group started its activity on 9. 3. 2020 and members are mainly from 11 institutions in the Czech Republic, that took part in the national support scheme for institutional development of Open Science-based actions taken by the implementation of Action Plan for the Implementation of the National Strategy of the Czech Republic’s Open Access to Scientific Information for 2017–2020.

The National Information Centre for European Research is also active with the dissemination of knowledge and support in the area of Open Science. 

Masarykova univerzita represents OpenAIRE in the national network of open science experts. NOAD-CZ is supporting Open Science activities in the Czech Republic, e.g. investigators of H2020 projects with EU requirements, preparation of Data Management Plans and other duties.

NOAD-CZ members are part of the Czech government working group on the implementation of the Action Plan of the National Strategy of Open Access. A survey on research data repositories is ongoing, as well as the cooperation with the EOSC-synergy project, currently support landscaping analysis in the Czech Republic.

There is an active group supporting Creative Commons in the Czech Republic (members of NGO Open Content). This group is directly linked to the mentioned initiative of Assoc. of Libraries of Czech Universities and to the NOAD-CZ and also to the National Information Centre for European Research (National Contact Point for H2020). More about CC CZ can be found here: https://www.creativecommons.cz/ (only in Czech).

There is also CzechELib – National Centre for Electronic Information Resources responsible for dealing with academic publishers on National level and newly founded action group under the Research, Development and Innovation Council of Czech Government, that is discussion national approach of transformation towards Gold Open Access Model. At national level, there is also an action group formed in 2019 responsible for the implementation of Action Plan for the Implementation of the National Strategy of the Czech Republic’s Open Access to Scientific Information for 2017–2020 (only in Czech).

The current president of European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers (Eurodoc) is also from the Czech Republic, Ms. Eva Hnátková, currently working for National Library of Technology.

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Cyprus

Since 2009 Cyprus, via the Library of the University of Cyprus, is participating in European funded projects that aim to promote the Open Science policies of the European Commission, as National Open Access Desk (NOAD).

Many awareness activities (presentations, meetings, workshops etc) took place since 2009 focusing on several stakeholders.

In addition, as part of the NOADs obligations for Open Access and Open Science awareness activities, the form of a National Open Access Working Group was considered as an essential task for putting Open Science in action.

In 2015, with the coordination of the OpenAIRE Cyprus NOAD the different stakeholders involved in the Working Group for Open Access (consisting of the National Point of Reference for Open Access, namely the Directorate General for European Programmes, Coordination and Development, the Research promotion foundation, local academic institutions and research funders), and highly supported by the coordinators of the project PASTEUR4OA (Open Access Policy Alignment Strategies for European Union Research), the form of the document for the National policy for Open Access begun.

On the 25th of February 2016, the Council of Ministers of the Republic of Cyprus approved the adoption of the National policy for Open Access in Cyprus. The Cyprus OA policy document is available on the National Strategy for Research and Innovation page of the Directorate-General for European Programmes, Coordination and Development. The National policy provides guidelines and support for the implementation of Open Access for research outputs that are funded locally, aligned with the European policies and based on the already established infrastructure at European level (e.g. OpenAIRE). Several activities are taking place in Cyprus in order to support the adoption of the national policy and ensure the success of its implementation.

The choice of the long-term data repository is left to the researchers. The policy encourages the use of either disciplinary data archives, institutional repositories, or Zenodo. A Zenodo community named CYPRUS has been created and is curated by OPENAIRE Cyprus NOAD. The DG EPCD has encouraged all universities, researchers and research institutions to make use of this. The creation of a national data archive was discussed at a May 2018 meeting of the National Working Group.

In 2019, a revision of the policy (draft document) was created by the Cyprus OpenAIRE NOAD (based on the OpenAIRE RPO template), and forwarded to the relevant stakeholders. The document is under study and is to be further discussed in 2020.

Regarding the fulfilment of EOSC vision, Cyprus is participating with two partners (the University of Cyprus and the Cyprus Institute) in the InfraEOSC 5b project, National Initiatives for Open Science in Europe – NI4OS Europe that aims to be a core contributor to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) service portfolio, commit to EOSC governance and ensure inclusiveness on the European level for enabling global Open Science.

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Croatia

There is no national policy on open science or open access to scientific publications and research data in place in Croatia.

The document Strategy of education, science and technology (in Croatian) consider open educational materials and open access to scientific information as the strategic orientation for science and education in Croatia in the future. Also, the Croatian Research and Innovation Infrastructures Roadmap mention “promotion of open access to research data, especially data funded from public sources”, and “open access to scientific and research data for all” members of the scientific and research community (researchers, teachers and students) in Croatia.

In 2012 a group of representatives consisting of university faculty and research staff, librarians and students presented the document Croatian Open Access Declaration which has been supported by ministries, HE and research institutions, and many individuals from Croatia and abroad. Croatian OA Declaration invites “the state administration, headed by the ministry responsible for science, as well as scientific and educational institutions, organisations, professional associations, and all the others involved in gathering and publishing scientific information to act decisively and in coordination in order to store all the Croatian scientific information in Open Access form”.

Three institutions have the institutional open access policy in place.

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Belgium

Belgium recognized in an early stage the importance of Open Access. Many Belgian research organisations subscribed to the Berlin Declaration on Open Access in 2007. This ambition was affirmed by the Brussels Declaration on Open Access, signed in 2012 by the Belgian, Flemish and French Community ministers of research at a conference organised by OpenAIRE. The declaration makes Open Access the default in circulating the results of Belgian academic and scientific research.

Many universities and research institutions in Belgium run an institutional or subject-based Open Access repository. At present almost all universities and major university colleges have Open Access repositories. At present OpenDOAR list 36 Belgian repositories.

An Open Access provision has been adopted in the Belgian law in Sep. 2018. This law gives authors the right to make scholarly publications available in open access if the publication is a result of research funded by public funds for at least 50%, with a maximum embargo period of  6 months for STM and 12 months for SSH.

The ‘Open Access Decree’ of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation consolidates the deposit policy of the Universities, stipulating that all scientific articles subsidized by public funds must be deposited in an institutional directory.

The three main Belgian funders (BELSPO, FWO, F.N.R.S.) all have an Open Access Mandate. BELSPO also has an Open Data Mandate, FWO has research data management regulation in place.

The first Belgian EOSC event, called “Belgian Open Science EOSC Initiatives” was organized by the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, the Flemish and Federal Authorities and aimed to bring together all Belgian partners in EOSC projects.

EOSC in Belgium – an overview

The working groups of the Executive Board and nominated Belgian experts are:

EOSC related projects with Belgian partners

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