Myself and my colleague Vassilis Protonotarios attended (representing Agro-Know) the recently held OpenAIRE-COAR 2014 conference held under the theme Open Access Movement to Reality : Putting the Pieces Together. The conference was organised by OpenAIRE project and the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR). In summary, the event focused on open access and included several sessions covering different aspects of open access, ranging from legal to policy and reviewing/publication, so it was related to the ongoing work of Agrow-Know related projects, such as agINFRA and SemaGrow. Focus was put on text-mining for retrieving documents of interest for each user from the vast pool of Open Access publications.

The message was obvious: The European Commission invests in OA, so for example Gold OA costs are eligible for Horizon 2020 pilot projects and well-defined data management plans are required by each proposal/project. This is expected to give a boost to OA publications and related infrastructures.

Read our debrief report on our blog here