PASTEUR4OA

PASTEUR4OA is a European project aiming to coordinate strategies, activities and policies on Open Access (OA). Coordinated by the Greek National Documentation Centre and addressing the European Science in Society call, PASTEUR4OA involves a broad consortium of project partners who range from research-performing organizations through research funders to OA advocacy organizations.

A considerable progress was achieved on Open Access in Europe over the five years preceding the launch of the project, both in the provision of technical infrastructure and in the policy-related arena, with significant national policy developments in some EU countries and noteworthy progress at institutional level. However, mostly due to lack of coordination across the EU, a full harmonization between the policies of the Member States is still to be achieved.

PASTEUR4OA aims at improving coordination in developing OA policies that align to the European Commission’s Recommendations and Horizon2020 rules. The Nexa Center will exploit the involvement in PASTEUR4OA to increase its expertise in the field; in particular, by contributing to the analysis of existing OA mandates and the drafting of OA policy recommendations. Also, the Center will strengthen its networking and relationship with actual and potential OA-oriented policymakers.

The project dedicated the first year of activity building a network of national Key Node Organizations to coordinate their expertise on OA and exploit it in the process of OA policies harmonization and mapping existing OA policies within and outside Europe to analyse their differences and similarities.
The Nexa Center contributed to the PASTEUR4OA tasks by providing information on current and in-progress OA mandates in Italy and East Asia; this information complemented the OA policies mapping and analysis task of the project and provided an updated overview on the state of the art of Italian OA policies. In addition, the Nexa Center/Politecnico di Torino was designated as the Italian Key Node Organization; therefore, Nexa is currently contacting Italian research funders an research institutions to broaden the number of stakeholder involved in the project’s activities and enhance its own network of contacts with OA policymakers and experts who can affect future policy development.

PASTEUR4OA hosted a Europe-wide project meeting of national experts on Open Access, ‘Working Together to Promote Open Access Policy Alignment in Europe’, in London, the 3rd-4th of December 2014, in order to facilitate the development of supportive and productive relationships between the experts.

The PASTEUR project last 6 months activity will be focused on the analysis of OA policies adopted by Italian universities, and on the development of an automatic mechanism to compare the European policies hosted in the ROARMAP database with the Horizon2020 OA rules, in order to push the alignment. The results of the comparative analysis will be disseminated through different activities: a briefing paper, a webinar and a presentation at the Italian National Workshop of the European Project OpenAIRE.

In addition the Nexa Center organized (together with University of Minho) and hosted the Paster4OA SWE Regional Workshop “Working Together to Promote Open Access Policy Alignment in Europe” on 22nd February 2016. 36 participants took part to the workshop, including 11 speakers and the two session chairs. The workshop has hosted discussions on the status of OA in Europe, on implementation and monitoring issues, and a roadmap for the next steps of the OA community has been drafted, to envision the path after the end of the project.

The final conference of the PASTEUR4OA took place on 17-18 May 2016. Under the title Green Light for Open Access: Aligning Europe’s OA Policies, it attracted some 150 delegates from as far away as Australia. Participants included OA experts, funders, research institutions and policy makers, who came together to discuss the overall OA landscape and the achievements of the project. A brief report in Italian has been drafted by the Nexa Center, while the full report is available here.