User:Filippo Morsiani/Open access in Cyprus

Open Access is in a process of development in Cyprus. Awareness and dissemination activities have been fruitful: institutions are getting more involved in this area.There are 5 universities in Cyprus, each with their own research institutions. The Research Promotion Council funds and promotes research in the country but most research is EU funded (OpenAIRE). University of Cyprus and Cyprus University of Technology have institutional repositories; as of July 2015, DOAJ indexes 05 OA journals which are published in Cyprus. OpenDOAR registers 04 institutional OA digital repositories maintained by the Eastern Mediterranean University, the Cyprus University of Technology, the Open University of Cyprus and the University of Cyprus. No OA policies are currently registered in ROARMAP at either the institutional or national level.

Enabling Environment
The University of Cyprus has signed the Berlin Declaration.

Potential Barriers
There is no national mandate or OA coordinating body in Cyprus; lack of awareness of open access issues.

Major Projects/Initiatives
On 21 October 2013, the "Cyprus University of Technology Open Access Author Fund" was launched. The agreement between the Cyprus University of Technology Library and the pharmaceutical company REMEDICA was signed, according to which academic publications will be funded on Open Access terms. The terms include publishing in Open Access journals, the publishers being member of Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association and following the OASPA Code of Conduct. In the case of books these must be published in the Directory of Open Access Books.

The informative activities (due to OpenAIRE and OpenAIREplus) have already been and will continue to be helpful in establishing a collaboration mechanism among researchers, institutions, funding organizations, EC National Reference Point, repository managers, librarians and the librarians association – a real human network that ensures that the idea, spirit, approach and practices compliant with Horizon 2020 Open Access (OA) mandates will continue to spread and be served.

INTRA database has been initiated at the University of Cyprus in

preparation for setting up an open institutional repository with the metadata and the digital objects (papers, technical reports, numerical data).

E-BiBa a Greek and Cypriot open access database on Information and Library Science that contains conferences proceedings, journal papers, seminar documents) and systematically forwards papers to E-LIS, the international open access repository.

National and Institutional Level Policies/Mandates
Funding Mandate

No national mandate. However, EU, as major funder of research in Cyprus, carries an OA deposit mandate.

Thematic Open Access projects/Initiatives
Cyprus Inscriptions Database is part of the Ancient World Online (AWOL) project.

Past and Future OA Related Activities
October 2015: University of Cyprus Library (Cyprus): "Open access to research publications and data." This was a FOSTER-supported training programme organized in partnership with EIFL with the aim of setting in place sustainable mechanisms for EU researchers to Foster Open Science. This was one of the 24 training programmes organized in 2015 for the research communities of 17 other EU countries.

On 22 April 2015 the first meeting of the "Working Group for Open Access" took place in the University of Cyprus, in Nicosia, Cyprus in the presence of the local National Points of Reference for Open Access, the main funding institutions for research in Cyprus, and representatives from almost all the academic institutions of Cyprus. The event was organized by the OpenAIRE2020 Cyprus NOAD. The agenda of the meeting included the policies and practices of EU on Open Access, Open Access benefits, the necessity of the adoption of a national Open Access policy and the potential creation of a national OA repository, which would function as a national harvester for the institutional repositories of Cyprus.

"Open Access Week" was celebrated on 24 October 2014 at the University of Cyprus, where the University of Cyprus Library (Cyprus OpenAIRE National Open Access Desk) and the Cyprus Association of Librarians-Information Scientists co-organized a one-day conference "Open Access to knowledge: policies and actions in EU and local level".

List of Publications
Giannoulakis, Stamatios and Zervas, Marios and Artemi, Petros Promoting Open Access at the Cyprus University of Technology: survey results., 2012. In 5th International Conference on Information Law 2012, Corfu, June 29–30, 2012. [Conference paper]

National Open Access and Preservation Policies in Europe: Analysis of a Questionnaire to the European Research Area Committee; EUROPEAN UNION, 2011.