European Commission provides funding to improve Open Access publishing landscape
The Craft-OA project involves 23 partners in 14 European countries; UC is one of the consortium members
From January 2023, the University of Coimbra will be involved in another Open Science project: the CRAFT-OA project ("Creating a Robust Accessible Federated Technology for Open Access") involves 23 partners in 14 European countries and will last for 36 months. The project is funded under the Horizon Europe framework programme, aiming to evolve and strengthen the institutional publishing landscape of Diamond Open Access (Diamond OA): no fees for authors or readers.
By offering tangible services and tools for the entire journal publishing lifecycle, CRAFT-OA will empower local and regional platforms and service providers to extend, professionalise and achieve greater interoperability with other scientific information systems for content and platforms. These developments will help researchers and publishers involved in publishing.
The project focuses on four action strands to improve the Diamond OA model:
(1) Providing technical improvements for journal platforms and journal software.
(2) Building communities of practice to promote overall infrastructure improvement
(3) Increase the visibility, discoverability and recognition of Diamond OA publishing
(4) Integrate Diamond OA publishing with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and other large-scale data aggregators.
The CRAFT-OA consortium partners already have a long-standing commitment to publication and institutional infrastructure and are committed to sustaining and developing capabilities in the field. At the University of Coimbra, work will build on the experience of the Coimbra University Press (IUC). CRAFT-OA will provide technical tools, training events, training materials, information, and services for the institutional publishing environment of diamond journals. It will also foster communities of practice with the capacity to sustain project improvements over time.
Members and related projects
In addition to UC, the consortium includes: the University of Göttingen as coordinator, the OPERAS Research Infrastructure, the Federation of Finnish Learning Societies, the Max Weber Foundation, the Technische Informationsbibliothek, the Informatics Centre of the University of Zagreb, Masaryk University, the European Science Foundation, the Science Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, OpenAIRE, the University of Bern, the University of Turin, EGI, Zadar University, IBL PAN and the State and University Library of Hamburg (Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg), the University of Warsaw, the University of Aix-Marseille and DOAJ.
The CRAFT-OA project is linked to other European projects supporting Diamond Open Access journals, especially the 3-year DIAMAS project (Developing Institutional Open Access Publishing Models to Advance Scholarly Communication). As CRAFT-OA mainly supports Diamond Open Access publishing by providing a technological upgrade, the DIAMAS project supports Diamond Open Access on a non-technical level by creating a capacity centre and a community.
The PALOMERA project (Policy Alignment of Open Access Monographs in the European Research Area) also investigates institutional scholarly communication but focuses on books and especially on policies for books. The project will also be launched in January 2023, with a duration of two years.
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More about OPERAS infrastructure projects: https://operas-eu.org/projects/
The University of Coimbra is a member of the Executive Assembly of OPERAS and leader of the Special Interest Group on Multilingualism. More information: https://operas-eu.org/special-interest-groups/multilingualism-2/