OpenAIRE and Knowledge Unlatched sign agreement to develop an Open Research Analytics Service

Athens/Berlin, September 13th, 2019: OpenAIRE and Knowledge Unlatched (KU) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to develop an Open Infrastructure for Open Research Analytics. Both organizations share the common goal of building infrastructure that accelerates the scholarly community’s transition to Open Access. The service will deliver valuable insights to institutions based on the integration of distributed data sources such as usage data from repositories, open access platforms and cost information from OpenAPC.

The Open Research Analytics service expands on the existing KU Open Analytics software as a reporting layer over the OpenAIRE repository usage data. Integrated repositories benefit from improved insights into the COUNTER-compliant usage data and benchmarking against alternative hosting platforms.

Additionally, the agreement articulates the following objectives :

• the development of a public roadmap
• collaboration on an international membership model
• increasing the number of OpenAIRE compliant Institutional Repositories
• supporting on-going improvements of the KU Open Analytics and OpenAIRE technical infrastructure

"We look forward to working with innovative approaches for analytics based on an Open Metrics Infrastructure model,” says Natalia Manola, Managing Director at OpenAIRE. “We welcome KU's initiative as a robust and stable usage statistics service to promote the next generation of institutional repositories. We hope that this will be one of many collaborations to come, not only for Europe but also for the international scientific community.”

"“We believe analytics are key to further accelerate Open Access. With this Open Infrastructure, institutions will be in a better position to examine OA developments and the role of repositories,” says Max Mosterd, Head of Operations and Analytics at Knowledge Unlatched

Over the next months, product improvements will be made by both parties, as well as preparations for the upcoming membership model for the Open Research Analytics Service. The expected launch of the service is early 2020.

About OpenAIRE: OpenAIRE is a European project supporting Open Science with a pan-european infrastructure. With a network of dedicated Open Science experts, OpenAIRE promotes and provides training on Open Science, shifting scholarly communication towards openness and transparency and facilitating innovative ways to communicate and monitor research. https://openaire.eu

About Knowledge Unlatched (KU): KU offers every reader worldwide free access to scholarly content. The KU platform and services enable libraries worldwide to centralize their support for Open Access models and initiatives from leading publishers. https://knowledgeunlatched.org

OpenAIRE:
Ilaria Fava
Communications at OpenAIRE
communications(at)openaire(dot)org

Knowledge Unlatched:
Max Mosterd
Head of Operations and Analytics
max(at)knowledgeunlatched(dot)org