In this guest blog, Zia Lennard (R2M Solution, on behalf of the Sustainable Places Organising Committee) tells us about his experience of partnering with Open Research Europe to enable Sustainable Places conference collaborators to publish their research open access.
A rewarding partnership with Open Research Europe
Sustainable Places is a dedicated conference for showcasing results coming out of the Horizon Europe and Horizon 2020 programmes, focused on designing, building, and retrofitting the places we live and work in a more sustainable way.
Hosted by R2M Solution, each year approximately 150 EU-funded projects come together for networking, project clustering, and presenting technological solutions for society, as well as the creation of market opportunities resulting from these research and innovation projects.
The partnership between Sustainable Places and Open Research Europe began in 2022 for the 10th edition of the conference, hosted in Nice, France, and provides dedicated open access publication opportunities for all conference contributors with Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe funding (this also includes researchers whose grants has since expired, as long as the research being published relates to the original grant).
The core audience of Sustainable Places involves participants from EU research projects, specifically focused on energy and the build environment, coming together for scientific dissemination and clustering. Therefore, when Open Research Europe was launched, it became a primary objective to move away from partnerships with non-EU-based publication partners for the Sustainable Places conference and to align with the Open Research Europe publishing platform.
As a result, conference delegates are able to publish their work in a dedicated Collection on Open Research Europe, taking advantage of its open access publishing model and open peer review process.
“Open Research Europe has proven to be the perfect publishing venue for the Sustainable Places Conference.
As a Horizon 2020 conference, Sustainable Places participants publishing with Open Research Europe can be confident that the open access requirements set out in their grant are not only being met, but exceeded, due to the comprehensive implementation of open science principles on the platform. This includes not only open access to research but open data and open peer review processes, ensuring researchers benefit from full transparency and collaboration.
Additionally, the variety of article types supported by Open Research Europe provides researchers with the opportunity to publish all research outputs resulting from the conference, ensuring there is less research waste and more opportunity to gain recognition and credit across the research project.
Open Research Europe’s innovative post-publication peer review model, and the ability to create dedicated Collections quickly, means that outputs can be captured without delay, which is valuable from both a researcher’s and conference organizer’s perspective.
We believe Open Research Europe plays a key part in meeting the needs of the research community it serves, and we hope this is one of many conference collaborations to come.”
– Sam Hall, Open Research Europe
Reflecting on Sustainable Places 2022
SP2022 “celebrated a decade of sustainability” with a comprehensive program covering key sustainability topics including renewable energy, building performance, AI and ethics in manufacturing, digitalization of the building sector, and more.
The SP2022 plenary sessions “Innovate with France” and “Innovate with Monaco” offered a view into two municipalities, Nice and Monaco, where urban area energy and sustainability transitions are currently in full focus. For example, Nice is undertaking an ambitious project in sustainable development and urban planning through its Éco-Vallée and Éco-Campus, while the Sustainable Mediterranean Buildings of Monaco (BD2M) initiative seeks to promote best practices in sustainable planning and construction in line with the specific Mediterranean climate of the municipality.
The latter session was also a timely one, as it had been announced not long before the conference that Monaco’s organizations and businesses are now eligible to participate in calls for research and development projects launched as part of the Horizon Europe programme, and we heard from several Monaco-based organizations during the event.
So far, 14 papers from SP2022 have been published in the Open Research Europe Collection and currently undergoing peer review, with more expected over the coming months.
Looking ahead to Sustainable Places 2023
The second collaboration between Sustainable Places and Open Research Europe will be for the upcoming 11th edition of the conference, SP2023, which will be held from 14th to 16th June 2023 in Madrid, Spain.
The SP2023 Call for Proposals is now available until 14th May, with themes including:
- Energy Communities, Smart Cities and Urban Transition
- Renewable Energy Technologies
- Sustainable Construction and Renovation
- Decarbonization and Circularity
- Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation
- Facilitating the Energy Transition: Policy, Finance and Training
- Sustainable Urban Renewal and Cultural Transformation
- Digitalization, Smartness and Artificial Intelligence
- Resilience and Energy Security
Once again, conference delegates with Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe funding will be able to publish their work in a dedicated Sustainable Places 2023 Collection on Open Research Europe.
The value of publishing Horizon-funded research open access with Open Research Europe
Publishing with Open Research Europe makes it easy for Sustainable Places contributors with Horizon funding (or previous Horizon funding, as long as the published work relates to the original grant) to comply with the open access terms of their grants, providing researchers with an open access publishing venue with no author-facing costs.
Importantly, the Open Research Europe team provides lots of support to authors from providing guidance to conference delegates to helping choose the most appropriate article type for their research.
“Sustainable Places hopes to continue its fruitful partnership with Open Research Europe for many years to come, and the Organising Committee would recommend all conferences or workshops that support EU-funded projects to consider partnering with Open Research Europe.”
– Zia Lennard, on behalf of Sustainable Places
Find out more about the Sustainable Places 2022 Collection and learn more about Open Research Europe and how it works.
