HEAL-Link Scholarly Communication

The Greek academic library community is enhanced with an Open Science service supported by HEAL-Link. The newly established "Scholarly Communication Unit" aims to provide librarians with information about Open Access (OA) and scholarly communication, such as best practices on research data, scholarly metrics and peer review. It is also assigned to represent the consortium in international partnerships and projects. The Scholarly Communication Unit operates in the University of Patras, a fundamental member of HEAL-Link.

HEAL-Link is the national academic libraries consortium serving as the link amongst academic libraries in Greece and supporting their needs in a homogenized and cost-effective manner. HEAL-link participates in OpenAIRE and shares responsibilities with ATHENA Research & Innovation Center in the context of the Greek NOAD activities.

The Scholarly Communication Unit supports different aspects of scholarly publishing. It monitors the progress of the HEAL-Link Open Access programmes, such as OA agreements with scientific publishers, and also reports on the Greek effect in trending topics, such as in COVID-19 research. Recently, the COVID-19 Dataset of Global Research of the database Dimensions was exploited to highlight COVID-19 publications of Greek researchers.

Furthermore, the Unit is committed to forward in the national research environment all relevant tools and innovations that will assist the Greek researchers to expose their work in an open and transparent way. Hence, it diffuses information about new advancements in scholarly publishing and facilitates better adoption by performing translations of vital Open Science resources in native language. A recent example is the Greek translation of the Open Research Europe (ORE) guidelines. ORE is the new European Commission platform for the open peer review and publication of research outputs funded by Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe frameworks.