Open Access to grey literature on e-Infrastructures: the BELIEF project digital library

The BELIEF (Bringing Europe's eLectronic Infrastructures to Expanding Frontiers) Project is a Coordination Action funded by the European Commission in the context of the FP6 and FP7 Programmes. It aims to create a platform where e-Infrastructures providers and users can collaborate and exchange knowledge. This will help ensuring that e-Infrastructures are deployed and effectively used worldwide, filling the gap separating the Research Infrastructure providers from the users, and thus contribute to the emergence of a competitive knowledge-based economy. To create this synergy among multi-disciplinary Research Infrastructure communities, BELIEF created a one-stop-shop for e-Infrastructures communities providing a Community Portal http://www.beliefproiect.ora/ and a Digital Library (DL) http://belief-dl.research-infrastructures.eu/ with a huge number of e-Infrastructures open access documents. Moreover, it has organised events including brainstorming, networking workshops and international conferences and publications, since BELIEF'S values are firmly rooted in international cooperation with the emerging economies, particularly in Latin America, India and South Africa. The BELIEF DL - implemented on top of the OpenDLib Software System - offers uniform access to multimedia documentation and especially to grey literature (e.g. presentations, videos, technical reports, manuals, on-line tutorials, etc.), providing continuously updated information on e-Infrastructures-related projects, initiatives and events. The contents are harvested from different sources, such as projects web sites, repositories and databases. The DL provides services to support the submission, description, searching, browsing, access, preservation and visualization of these multimedia documents. Although designed to meet the needs of a specific scientific community, the technology adopted by BELIEF can be easily adapted to meet the information and collaborative needs of other user communities. The BELIEF e-Infra structures Community ranges now on more than 80 projects, initiatives and organisations inside and outside Europe, and the DL offers nearly 15.000 documents harvested from their repositories and websites. The BELIEF Consortium is composed by Brunel University (UK), CNR-ISTI (Italy), ERNET (India), Escola Politecnica da Universidade de Sao Paolo (Brasil), Meraka Institute (South Africa), Meta ware SpA (Italy), and the National Kapodistrian University of Athens (Greece).