The objective of ALMASI is to provide the research community with an aligned, nonprofit, high-quality, and sustainable scholarly communication ecosystem across three world regions: Africa, Europe, and Latin America. This will enable scholarly communities to take full responsibility for innovative, valid, reliable and accessible publishing services and solutions that do not charge fees to readers or authors, commonly known as Diamond Open Access. This aligned nonprofit publishing ecosystem will take into account specific needs across the diversity of disciplines, global regions, and languages. The project will achieve this goal by concentrating on measures that will harmonise and strengthen existing nonprofit publishing services and solutions. ALMASI will establish a framework for knowledge transfer, coordination, and alignment of non-technological publishing skills, services, and solutions. The project will focus on (1) mapping nonprofit publishing services and solutions across the 3 regions; (2) aligned quality support instruments for publishing services; (3) shared training materials and curricula for publishing services, journal editors, and publishing staff; and (4) long-term financial sustainability and OS policies for scholarly publishing. The project will be carried out in the context of the nascent Global Diamond Federation, which is supported by UNESCO.

Academic books continue to play an important role in scholarly production and research communication, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. As an important output of scholarly production, academic books must be included in open science/open access policies and strategies developed by research funders and institutions, to ensure that open science becomes the modus operandi of modern science across all disciplines. However, contrary to article publishing in journals (especially in the areas of Science, Technology, and Medicine) academic books have not been a focus point for open access (OA) policymakers. Consequently books are only rarely mandated to be published OA by research funders and institutions. PALOMERA will investigate the reasons for this situation across geographies, languages, economies, and disciplines within the European Research Area (ERA). Through desk studies, surveys, in-depth interviews, and use cases, PALOMERA will collect, structure, analyse, and make available knowledge that can explain the challenges and bottlenecks that prevent OA to academic books. Based on this evidence PALOMERA will provide actionable recommendations and concrete resources to support and coordinate aligned funder and institutional policies for OA books, with the overall objective of speeding up the transition to open access for books to further promote open science. The recommendations will address all relevant stakeholders (research funders and institutions, researchers, publishers, infrastructure providers, libraries, and national policymakers). The PALOMERA consortium broadly represents all relevant stakeholders for OA academic books, but will facilitate co-creation and validation events throughout the project to ensure that the views and voices of all relevant stakeholders are represented, promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion.This will assure maximal consensus and take-up of the recommendations.

Now the H2020 EOSC pilot project has taken the first steps towards creating the blueprint for an open European Science Cloud, this proposal aims to supply practical solutions for the use of the FAIR data principles throughout the research data life cycle. Emphasis is on fostering FAIR data culture and the uptake of good practices in making data FAIR. Keeping in mind that there is no ‘one size fits all’, the consortium will focus on all scientific communities for supporting, creating, further developing and implementing a common scheme to ensure data development, wide uptake of and compliance with FAIR data principles and practices by data producers as well as national and European research data providers and repositories contributing to the EOSC. Furthermore, the consortium will closely collaborate with other relevant (global) projects and initiatives already on the way e.g. GO-FAIR, Research Data Alliance (RDA), World Data System (WDS), CODATA. We will provide a platform for using and implementing the FAIR principles in the day to day work of national and European research data providers and repositories. The consortium cooperates with other projects that will be funded under the INFRAEOSC-05-2018 topic (e.g. the EOSC governance (5a) and where appropriate 5b, the projects funded in the INFRAEOSC-04-2018 topic (e.g. the ESFRI clusters SSHOC, PANOSC, ENVRI FAIR, ESCAPE and EOSCLife) and with the EOSC coordination structure developed in the existing EOSC-pilot and EOSC-hub projects. According to the research data life cycle (planning/creating, processing, analysing, preserving and reuse) the consortium partners have defined goals, activities and outputs on - making data FAIR through research workflows - ensuring long-term preservation of data - making data FAIR through data curation - improving accessibility of research data (e.g. legal barriers) - improving findability of data through creation and interconnection of metadata catalogues - curricula/education