October 23, 2019. – Canada’s three federal granting agencies have agreed to partner with the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) on a pilot project which seeks to use the OpenAIRE service to improve the discoverability of Canadian open access content.
The widespread sharing of research articles and data, referred to as open science, promises to improve research impact, increase transparency of research findings, and accelerate the pace of new discoveries. In Canada, the three federal granting agencies—the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)— have implemented policies that aim to increase the adoption of open practices in the research community. However, there is currently no comprehensive way to discover and track these research outputs, as they are distributed across many platforms, repositories and services. In addition, there is no standard approach to relate a given research publication or data set with the organization that funds the research.
To address this gap, CARL entered into a pilot project with the large European discovery service OpenAIRE to aggregate and facilitate discovery of Canadian content and enable the agencies to better access Canadian research outputs and identify their open access status. CARL and the agencies will work together to develop a common approach to identifying funders and projects in the metadata, while OpenAIRE will aggregate information from the agencies’ public grants databases and many other content sources to create connections between articles, authors, and funders.
The CARL Open Repositories Working Group is overseeing this project, under a project team led by Pierre Lasou, Université Laval. Nine Canadian institutions are participating in the initial phase and the aim is to have a working prototype by early 2020.
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CARL members include Canada’s twenty-nine largest university libraries as well as two national libraries. Enhancing research and higher education are at the heart of its mission. CARL develops the capacity to support this mission, promotes effective and sustainable scholarly communication, and public policy that enables broad access to scholarly information.
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