The eI4Africa and iMENTORS partnerships are very pleased to welcome a new associated organisation to the eI4Africa/iMentors joint conference on the theme “e-Infrastructures for Africa: Gateways to the Future” that will take place on October 29, 2014, in Brussels, Belgium.

OpenAIRE is the Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe which supports open access to the research output of European funded projects. The substantial technical infrastructure operates on two levels:

• Gathering research outputs: OpenAIRE gathers open access content from a network of institutional and disciplinary repositories. To put this into practice, an integrated suite of guidelines[2] have been developed so that data sources, namely literature and data repositories and CRIS systems can be harvested and their contents made more visible. The portal gives access to EU-funded scientific publications, and also provides monitoring tools for depositing and usage statistics.
• Policy harmonisation and community outreach: OpenAIRE has a collaborative and thriving ‘human’ network, which is pan-European in nature. The community work to advance open access initiatives at national levels. It has National Open Access Desks in nearly 30 countries, and operates a European Helpdesk system for all matters concerning open access, copyright and repository interoperability.

OpenAIRE is starting to move from a publication infrastructure to a more comprehensive infrastructure that covers all types of scientific output, and is establishing an infrastructure to harvest, enrich and store the metadata of scientific datasets. Cross-links from publications to data and funding schemes will be supported. This will optimise the research process, allowing the sharing, enrichment and reuse of data.

For more information on open access, see the OpenAIRE support pages.