CORA (Catalan Open Research Area)

What is CORA?

CORA, which stands for Catalan Open Research Area, is a web portal that centralizes and promotes open science and open access in the academic and research sphere in Catalonia. The CORA portal aims to enhance the positioning, visibility, and impact of research in Catalonia while complying with European transparency guidelines by showcasing portals that provide access to research activities from a single location and unified image.

CORA serves as a showcase for open science in Catalonia, offering access to various open science services provided by CSUC: 

• Portal de la Recerca de Catalunya (PRC): a website to showcase and disseminate research activities conducted in Catalonia. The portal includes theses, research projects, publications, datasets, etc., from different universities and research centers in Catalonia.
• Repositori de Dades de Recerca (RDR): a federated and multidisciplinary data repository for publishing research datasets following the FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) and adhering to the guidelines of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).
• eiNa DMP: a tool for creating Data Management Plans (DMPs). It enables collaborative and online work, provides guidance and examples, allows plan sharing among researchers, facilitates plan review requests, and allows exporting plans in various formats for submission to funding bodies.
• Tesis Doctorals en Xarxa (TDX): a cooperative repository containing digitized doctoral theses from universities in Catalonia and other autonomous communities. 

In addition to access to the mentioned portals and services, CORA compiles and showcases all the work done by universities and research centers in Catalonia in recent years regarding open science. This includes current institutional open access policies in Catalonia, which are based on a framework document agreed upon by the Interuniversity Council of Catalonia (CIC) in 2010 to facilitate the approval of open access policies at Catalan universities. 

As a showcase, CORA also collects various online resources promoting open access in research in Catalonia. Furthermore, the portal includes a section with information about open access, detailing transformative agreements to publish openly with reference publishers or an indicator monitoring the degree of open access of publications.

This project is part of the Next Generation Recovery Plan, as part of the Union's response to the COVID-19 pandemic under the ERDF Operational Program for Catalonia 2014-2020 with a grant of € 12.73 million.