Open Science is ushering in a new paradigm for research; one in which all researchers have unprecedented access to the full corpus of research for analysis, text and data mining, and other new research methods. A prerequisite for achieving this vision is a strong and well-functioning network of repositories that provides human and machine access to the wide range of valuable research outputs. In January 2023, OpenAIRE, LIBER, SPARC Europe, and COAR launched a joint strategy to strengthen the European repository network. As a first step, a survey was undertaken in February-March 2023.

The survey found that European repositories acquire, preserve and provide open access to tens or possibly hundreds of millions of valuable research outputs. They are used for sharing articles that may be paywalled in published journals, but also for providing access to a large variety of other types of research outputs including research data, theses/dissertations, conference papers, preprints, code, and so on. The survey has also exposed a number of important areas where the current repository landscape could be strengthened. This presentation will provide an overview of the results of the survey, and present the joint strategy being developed and deployed by our four organizations.

Though there has been a great deal of attention given to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals since their introduction, the approach to recording research aligned with the goals in EPrints has been inconsistent and this has negatively impacted the visibility of such research. This presentation introduces a recently developed EPrints plugin for tracking and publicising research associated with the 17 SDGs. It will include a technical overview of this plugin and the features that have been developed to increase the transparency of SDG-related research in EPrints repositories.

The theme of this year's Open Repositories conference, focused on how we can benefit from repositories to empower global progress, drives us to present and discuss the future and new directions of the development of the OpenAIRE Interoperability Guidelines. This presentation aims to present and discuss the recent changes in the guidelines towards its simplification and harmonization, the open issues reported by the community that need to be addressed by the working group and the main components that require a global synchronisation between regional and national repository networks and initiatives.

The OpenAIRE Guidelines play a vital role in OpenAIRE's strategic approach to address the sustainability, openness, and modernization challenges faced by Scholarly Infrastructures, while ensuring enhanced interoperability.

OpenAIRE Guidelines streamlined and modernized

The OpenAIRE Guidelines are a suite of application profiles designed to allow research performing organisations to make their scholarly outputs visible through the OpenAIRE infrastructure. The profiles are based on established standards and designed to help repository managers expose publications, datasets and CRIS metadata via the OAI-PMH protocol. The OpenAIRE Guidelines have been released for publication repositories, data archives, CRIS systems, software repositories and repositories of other research products.

This presentation looks at the history of Open Access from the perspective of the author, a software engineer in the sector for nearly 25 years. In that time he has been involved in local, national and international efforts in all aspects of the development of repositories and the infrastructure services that support them. It is about what we’ve actually seen be developed and become reality in that time, and how it connects to the goals and desires of the community. It asks what lessons we can learn from that time, and what that might tell us about the future of OA, and whether it is alive and well or under threat. What is the role that the repository has to play in the coming publishing paradigms which aim to improve global publishing equity (such as Diamond and Overlay Journals) and how can we as a community enable it.