Open Access in Horizon 2020: a conference held in Pisa



This year has started the biggest EU Research and Innovation programme: Horizon 2020. This programme aims to secure Europe's global competitiveness by making available €80 billion of funding for 7 years (2014 to 2020). 

The European Commision has recently published the Guidelines on Open Access to Scientific Publications under H2020. For this reason, the CNR of Pisa organized the conference “Open Science 2020: harmonizing current OA practices with H2020 guideline” to which we participated in.

Reports were interesting and provided great deal of reflection, starting from the principles contained in the guidelines that have extended the concept of publication (for which now we talk about data, experiments and not only about papers).

The first report was by Jakko Siren (EU Commission) who illustrated the 6 pilot projects for which the open access version of publications is mandatory. These projects are: Future and Emerging Technologies, Research infrastructures, Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies, Smart cities and communities, Societal Challenge: Climate Action, Environment, Resource Efficiency and Raw materials, Societal Challenge: Europe in a changing world and Science with and for Society.

After Siren’s report, were presented case studies of projects developed by some Italian research institutions and an overview of the state of art of Open Access in Italy.

Juan Carlos de Martin (National Point of Reference for the open access policies, EU) gave a brief history of open access and suggested 5 proposals for its promotion in the academic world:

  1. a more active role of professors in supporting open access;
  2. increased involvement of institutions;
  3. creation of a network of referents in each departments for OA advice; 
  4. inclusion of open access among the teaching topics for PhD student 
  5. establishment of "open access awards" to increase awareness in academic community.


Finally, we report some observations made by Roberto Case (Delegate to open access in university of Trento) about the current trends of the researchers who prefer to deposit their publications in social networks (ResearchGate and Academia.edu) rather than institutional repositories. He also launched the idea about a national open access association, which was welcomed by everyone.


 
It was a beautiful experience for us because we have always supported open access with great effort in our small library by the creation of IMT institutional repositories and the information sharing about OA.
For more information about Horizon 2020: http://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/

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