ERC joins major open access repository
The European Research Council (ERC) has announced that it has joined an international partnership supporting arXiv, one of the major scientific repositories in the areas of physics and mathematics. The ERC is the first European research funding organisation to join the initiative.
Speaking about the announcement, Professor Nicholas Canny, ERC Scientific Council member and chair of the Council’s Working Group on Open Access, said: “The Scientific Council has long recognised the global position that arXiv has already attained as a scientific scholarly communication forum. By joining arXiv, the ERC now has the chance to contribute to the further development and enhancement of the service to match the evolving needs of the scientific community.”
ArXiv, which started off as a repository for preprints in physics and later expanded to mathematics, statistics, computer science and engineering sciences, operates eight mirror sites around the world. The service is operated by Cornell University Library in the State of New York, USA, and allows scientists to share their research in the form of preprints prior publication. ArXiv also allows researchers to deposit their final accepted manuscripts or published articles, though dependent on publisher permissions.
ArXiv is actively used by ERC-funded researchers to provide open access to their research results and currently over 3,000 research papers resulting from ERC projects have already been deposited. In 2012, arXiv saw around 64 million downloads from across the world and received more than 84,000 new submissions. More than 170 institutions from 22 countries are currently supporting the initiative financially.
Providing free access to research outputs is currently being championed both within Europe and in the United States and open access will be mandatory for all scientific publications produced with funding from Horizon 2020.
