Belgium

Belgian organisations have invested in Open Science infrastructure and policies since the early 2000s. Universities subscribed to the Berlin declaration in 2007, as did the Belgian, Flemish and French Community ministers of research in 2012. The European projects DRIVER and OpenAIRE started coordinating efforts in Belgium, uniting Open Science ambassadors in the informal network Open Access Belgium. Research organisations have set up publication and data repositories throughout the years, most of them compliant to OpenAIRE guidelines and thus part of the OpenAIRE Research Graph.

Research is a regional competence, managed by Flanders and the Wallonia-Brussels Federation. Flanders started the Flemish Open Science Board (FOSB) to coordinate efforts, in Wallonia-Brussels Federation a working group is established. The Belgian Federal Science Policy Office (BELSPO) is managing the Open Science policies at the Federal level. In November 2019, the first Belgian EOSC event "Belgian Open Science EOSC Initiatives" was organized by the three policy levels. 

EOSC-Pillar partner Ghent University is also the National Open Access Desk for Belgium (NOAD) in the context of OpenAIRE. The University is, in particular, contributing to the activities of our Work Package on "Establishing FAIR Data Services", coordinating the development of the EOSC-Pillar Training and Support Catalogue.

If you are part of a Belgian Open Science initiative and want to learn more about EOSC, check out the EOSC-Pillar Ambassadors Programme.

Roadmap for consolidating National Initiatives

Within the EOSC-Pillar project, the so-called "Transversal Task Force" conducted a series of interviews to further gain insights into the national landscape, analyzing the status of National Initiatives and specifically of Mandated Organisations in the realm of the EOSC Association.

The full report, completed Oct 2021, is available here,  while the excerpt focusing on the Mandated Organisation for Belgium is here.

Legal and Policy Framework and Federation Blueprint

Within the EOSC-Pillar project, Work-Package WP4 compiled a thorough study of the legal and policy state of the art in the involved countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy), identifying commonalities and gaps or challenges, and proposing recommendations for researchers on the rules and procedures with respect to legal issues regarding open access, open data, and cross border data access.

The full report (last update, Sep. 2021) is available here, while an excerpt containing details on Open Science Regulations and Policies, National copyright laws, Personal data protection laws in Belgium is available here. 

EOSC Observatory

Check out the EOSC Observatory, a policy intelligence tool being developed by the EOSC Future project for monitoring policies, practices, and impacts related to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). It will support the EOSC community in tracking the implementation of EOSC and the policy makers in developing actionable policies.