2 December was the official launch date of OpenAIRE -- Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe -- providing researchers with open access to publications emerging from research funded by the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). The 2-week-old site is still small, but it's growing quickly.
The launch of OpenAIRE is the latest part of a European Commission pilot initiative to encourage open access to the research it funds. Since August 2008, EC-funded researchers in the fields of energy, environment (including climate change), health, information and communication technologies, and research infrastructure have been required to make their peer-reviewed research articles freely available in an institutional or subject-based repository within 6 months of publication. Researchers in social and socioeconomic sciences and the humanities are given 12 months.
OpenAIRE aims to be a one-stop shop for exploring EC-funded research articles in those repositories as well as articles that did not find an open home. As I write this entry, about 200 papers are available online. Articles can be browsed by year, scientific area, or language.
For more information on the EC open access pilot project and OpenAIRE, see the OpenAIRE Web site.
