OpenAIRE and the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) are pleased to announce that a joint conference “Open Access: Movement to Reality – Putting the pieces together” and the COAR Annual Meeting will take place from May 21- 23, 2014 in Athens, Greece, at the Athens Acropolis Museum.

Momentum for Open Access (OA) and research data sharing continues to grow and endorsement for OA from governments, funding agencies and institutions around the world signal that it will soon become a default mode for scholarly output.

Critical to the success of OA are the infrastructures, both human and technical, that support policy implementation. To that end, many regions around the world are investing in the development of repository networks that facilitate OA and research data sharing.

The conference will explore how OA infrastructures are being practically implemented around the world. Sessions will touch on how repositories intersect with other library and research services and the variety of value added services that enhance them such as text-mining. Other focus areas will be measuring the impact of scientific output and data in the institutional context. The conference will also discuss the issue of global interoperability of repository networks.

In addition to the main conference event there will be a number of related workshops, sessions, project internal meetings and the COAR General Assembly.

EIFL-OA Programme Manager Iryna Kuchma and EIFL-OA Programme Coordinator Gwen Franck will attend and will coordinate the following satelite events:

• COAR-OpenAIRE Workshop: Focus on Research Data Management Plans on May 20th;
• COAR Working and Interest Groups “Breakfast Club” meeting on May 21st.

Background

EIFL is one of the OpenAIREplus (2nd Generation of Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe) project partners along with 41 other partners covering 31 European countries.

The 30-month OpenAIREplus project, funded by the EC 7th Framework Programme, facilitates access to the entire open access scientific production of the European Research Area, providing cross-links from publications to data and funding schemes.

EIFL is a founding member of COAR – its mission is to enhance the visibility and application of research outputs through a global network of open access digital repositories – having chaired the working group focused on support structures for repository networks and training for repository managers.