OpenAIRE

OpenAIRE is the European infrastructure for open science. It collects metadata about research outputs from thousands of repositories, journals, CRIS systems and registries, links them to one another and to the projects, funders and organisations behind them, and offers the result as a public graph and as services for researchers, institutions and funders. It began in 2009 as a project funded by the European Commission to support its open access policy; since 2018 it has been run by OpenAIRE AMKE, a non-profit legal entity whose members are European research organisations.

Services

service	what it does
OpenAIRE Graph	the aggregated, deduplicated graph of publications, datasets, software, projects, funders and organisations
Explore	the public search portal over the Graph
Provide	the dashboard for content providers: validation against the guidelines, registration, enrichment, usage statistics
Monitor	dashboards that let funders and institutions follow the outputs of their projects
Zenodo	the general-purpose repository launched with CERN, for any output with no better home

How a work gets in, and how it meets its project

A work reaches the Graph through any of its sources, and the copies are merged:

registered sources — institutional repositories (such as a university's IRIS), journals, CRIS systems, data archives;
registries and aggregators — such as Crossref, DataCite and ORCID;
Zenodo, the home for whatever has no other.

A work is linked to the project that funded it in three ways: by the funding reference in the source's metadata; by inference, mining the full texts for grant numbers; and by claims — links declared by people, either in Explore's Link service or by choosing the grant when depositing on Zenodo. A claim is visible at once and then reviewed by OpenAIRE's curators.

Guidelines and registration

OpenAIRE harvests only sources that follow its guidelines, one set per kind of source:

Literature repositories — version 4 defines the oai_openaire format: DataCite and Dublin Core elements, with ORCID iDs, funding references, and COAR vocabularies for resource type, access rights and version.
Data archives — DataCite.
CRIS managers — CERIF-XML.
Software repositories and other research products.

A source is checked with the Validator in the Provide dashboard, then registered there. Registration requires the source to be listed first in the authoritative registry for its kind: OpenDOAR for literature repositories, re3data for data repositories, DRIS for CRIS systems. The OpenAIRE aggregation team then reviews it and starts harvesting.

Why it matters

Funders' monitoring. The European Commission and national funders use OpenAIRE to see which publications came out of which grants. The link is the funding reference — for EU projects an info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/<programme>/<number> URI — so a publication that does not declare it is invisible to that monitoring.
Open access compliance. The access rights a source declares feed the open access statistics of programmes and institutions.
Discovery. Everything in the Graph is searchable in Explore and reused by other services through its open APIs and dumps.