Abstract

Research alliances like university networks or associations gather their members, with common or complementary backgrounds, to maximize their impact on research and society and empower their researchers with common tools, shared policies and guidelines to improve the quality of the research. Via the alliance, members and their affiliated researchers have more collaboration and funding opportunities. However, often it is not easy for an alliance to gain the deserved visibility towards funding organizations or the research staff. By analyzing the current landscape of research alliances it is possible to identify a set of strategic activities:
- Wide dissemination of all activities and researchers’ results within and beyond the alliance itself;
- Tracking the research outputs of the members, especially those resulted from a collaboration among the members of the alliance
- Promote Open Access and other Open Science practices (e.g. data sharing and Open Access publishing) to foster a more free circulation of knowledge within and beyond the researchers of the alliance, increase collaboration opportunities, and use it an accelerator towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as suggested by UNESCO
- Tracking the adherence to shared policies, domain best practices (for thematic alliances) and Open Science practices
- Find sustainable common solutions for services shared among the members, reducing the costs and reaching a higher number of users (e.g. for training programmes targeting research managers, administrators, researchers, students)

Addressing those activities in a sustainable way is in some cases not straightforward. Often, the tracking of research outcome is done manually, requiring a lot of effort for communicating with the single members, ensuring the quality and harmonizing the collected data so that it can be disseminated and/or analyzed. Another common problem is tracking the uptake of Open Science publishing practices of the researchers, identifying gaps and preparing tutorials and training to help them.
OpenAIRE, a scholarly communication infrastructure committed to the promotion of Open Science, is collaborating with several research alliances (Aurora, EUT+, EUTOPIA, FIT FORTHEM) to address those challenges. From the technical point of view, OpenAIRE provides to each alliance a customizable gateway where all research products of the members can be discovered via a single entry point and services to ease the adoption and tracking of Open Science practices (see https://connect.openaire.eu for the list of exsiting gateways and more information). From the training point of view, the collaborations give us the opportunity to enrich and exchange training material, expertise, and set up a joint dissemination strategy to further improve the visibility within the alliances, the OpenAIRE network, and beyond.