2019 ANNUAL REPORT

Amsterdam, April 20th, 2020

In many ways, 2019 was a difficult year.

Even though on the surface it seems that Open Access is gaining more momentum every year, in reality, we saw many promising initiatives halted or delayed by those responsible for implementation.
Our organization was affected directly by the discontinuation of the ‘GetH2020compliant’ pilot as was published early March 2019 in the amended work programme SWAFS 2018-2020. Even though much efforts were invested by us in this pilot, as a result of many reorganisations the directorate was not able to follow up and implement the action.

Through our website, we were able to continue advocating our Open Access mission and, through our magazine website, we were able to continue making research available in popular fashion.
During the year we continuously worked in preparation for the launch of Coalibry. Coalibry, which is short for Consolidated Open Access Library, will be launched early 2020. At that time our oalibrary.org website, containing approximately 1.5 million open access research papers, will be discontinued and replaced by our coalibry.org website that is planned to launch with approximately 20 million open access research papers. During the year is it planned that this massive number may even increase to 40 million research papers available in open access.
(At this moment of writing the 2019 annual report coalibry.org is live with 22 million papers).

From a financial point of view, 2019 was not very satisfying. The main reason for this is our current inability to aggressively market our existence and proposition.
We are trying to obtain a grant to remedy this. 2020 looks a bit more promising provided that we can keep the current cash flows combined with the fact that small amounts of monies have been allocated to the foundation from a European grant.

The grant is a so-called Erasmus+ grant in which UAF participates with organisations in Spain, Bulgaria (co-ordinator), Romania and Italy on creating some learning material for Smart Technologies by design. UAF is responsible for the management of social media and  PR. For this, we have managed to recruit a part-time resource through our affiliated research and development company, UA BV.