Project Overview
From 2018 to 2021, CARL (via its Open Repositories Working Group – ORWG) entered into a collaboration with OpenAIRE as part of the OpenAIRE Advance project. The ultimate aim of this collaboration was to provide a gateway to Canadian scholarly content, with an initial emphasis on representing the publications stemming from Tri-Agency funded projects in the OpenAIRE discovery portal.
Much of the CARL work took place behind the scenes and included the adoption of the OpenAIRE guidelines in Canadian repositories and journal platforms, working with OpenAIRE to ensure Tri-Agency affiliations are accurate, and developing workflows for curating metadata records.
The CARL OpenAIRE Task Group completed the pilot implementation phase in 2021. Several repositories are now harvested by OpenAIRE, and Canada’s federal granting agencies (CIHR, NSERC and SSHRC) have now been integrated into the OpenAIRE aggregation. Using the OpenAIRE Explore tool, users can limit results by agency to find funded research outputs. It is important to note that only research articles (or other types of output) that acknowledge the funder name are currently linked to each agency.
In 2022, the Canadian OpenAIRE Task Force was created to oversee the next phase of the CARL-OpenAIRE Collaboration, with the goal of expanding the CARL-OpenAIRE collaboration to additional institutions and ensuring sustainable management of the Collaboration in the future.
About OpenAIRE
OpenAIRE is a discovery service for articles and other types of content funded by the European Commission (EC). It was initially developed to help the EC track their funded research outputs and monitor compliance with their open access policy. OpenAIRE aggregates metadata and full text content from thousands of data providers around the world, and searches for affiliation information to identify relationships between funders and research outputs (such as articles and data). OpenAIRE services are freely available and can be accessed via the OpenAIRE website.
OpenAIRE (and repository networks in general) offers a mechanism for bringing together the repository community. It incentivizes a certain level of interoperability across Canadian repositories, provides an aggregation, and increasingly offers value added services such as common usage statistics, curation of metadata, and so on. It should be noted that as a greater number of repository software platforms are becoming OpenAIRE compliant out-of the box (e.g. DSpace 7) it will become much easier for many Canadian institutions to connect to OpenAIRE.
Last update: January 17, 2023
Credits:
This initial project undertaken under the leadership of the ORWG’s Task Group on OpenAIRE, led by Pierre Lasou (Laval University) and the Ad Hoc COVID-19 Working Group, led by Kathleen Shearer (CARL and COAR). Other participants were Lise Brin (CARL), Corey Davis (CARL), Danoosh Davoodi (University of Alberta), Sharon Fennel (University of Alberta), Jordan Hale (University of Waterloo), Geoff Harder (University of Alberta), Yoo Young Lee (University of Ottawa), Lindsey MacCallum (Mount Saint Vincent University), Courtney Earl Matthews (Queen’s University), Gabriela Mircea (McMaster University), Tomasz Neugebauer (Concordia University), Kelly Stathis (Portage Network-Canadian Association of Research Libraries), Andrea Szwajcer (University of Manitoba), and Mita Williams (University of Windsor).
