OpenAIRE (Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe)

Project description
OpenAIRE (December 2009 – November 2012) is aimed to deliver an e-infrastructure and supporting mechanisms for the identification, deposition, access, and monitoring of FP7 and ERC funded articles. Additionally, the project aims to offer a special repository for articles that can be stored neither in institutional nor in subject-based/thematic repositories. Thematically, the project focuses on peer-reviewed publications (primarily, journal articles in final or pre-print form, but also conference articles, when considered important) in at least the seven following disciplines: energy, environment, health, cognitive systems-interaction-robotics, electronic infrastructures, science in society, and socioeconomic sciences-humanities. It covers the European Union in its entirety, engaging people and scientific repositories in almost all 27 member states and beyond. The e-infrastructure built by the project is based the D-Net package developed within the DRIVER and DRIVER-II projects and the Invenio digital repository software developed at CERN. These are currently being enhanced and complemented with new services to monitor and generate statistics to measure the usage of FP7 and European Research Council funded research publications.
Additionally, the project builds the support and outreach means to embrace the system operation, by the establishment of a dedicated Pan-European Help Desk for Researchers to deposit their documents on the infrastructure and the operation and collaboration of 27 National Open Access Liaison Offices.

Collaboration
From the technical point of view, OpenAIRE is based on the software that forms a large spectrum of the DRIVER technology, the D-Net Platform. Moreover, the INVENIO system that is exploited in the D4Science-II INSPIRE interoperability use case is the another technological cornerstone of OpenAIRE. Interoperability with the OpenAIRE infastrastructure and collaboration with the project operating it thus follows quite naturally.
An extra reason for the collaboration is the fact that the DRIVER-II project ended its lifecycle early in the D4Science-II era. Although the DRIVER repository infrastructure remains fully functional, the needs for developing advanced interoperability cases, as those envisaged in the D4Science-II NA4 activities, go beyond the scope of the maintenance and typical upgrade of a repository e-Infrastructure service, such as envisaged by the DRIVER coalition initiative.
From a technological perspective, the collaboration aims into continuing the interoperability vision established by the DRIVER-D4Science collaboration (see D4Science-II Collaboration: DRIVER-II), looking into interfaces for retrieval and access that enable two-way integration of systems and advanced services, such as the ones described in the DRIVER collaboration case.

Plans for the future
From the D4Science-II perspective, the plan for the future collaboration are a natural continuation of the DRIVER-D4Science interoperability one. Thus it foresees design, development and integration of the systems that empower the two infrastructures that will result in extending gCube platform base and the integration of new services into the Ecosystem.
For the OpenAIRE, the utilization of the computational resources that lie behind D4Science infrastructure, is an opportunity for providing advanced services, at a minimal cost of allocating the related physical and software resources.