OpenAIRE Nexus Explained

OpenAIRE Nexus

An OpenAIRE-led Horizon-Europe-funded initiative (2021-2024) that bundles OpenAIRE services and tools into a coherent service portfolio for delivery through the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), targeting researchers, content providers, research communities, funders, and policy makers.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 5 Sept 2026

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OpenAIRE Nexus is an OpenAIRE-led, Horizon-Europe-funded initiative (2021-2024) that bundled OpenAIRE’s previously separate, project-funded services into one coherent, EOSC-deliverable portfolio: PROVIDE for content providers, MONITOR for funders tracking research outputs, CONNECT for research communities building topical “gateways,” the OpenAIRE Research Graph itself, Argos for data management plans, AMNESIA for anonymisation, and Zenodo for general-purpose deposit. Nexus is the operational vehicle by which these tools moved from a series of separately funded projects into the European Open Science Cloud’s persistent, ongoing service catalogue.

A research office is unlikely to interact with “Nexus” as a distinct product — it is a service-portfolio and governance label rather than a single interface — but is likely to use one or more of the individual services it bundles, most often Argos for DMPs or the Research Graph for discovering funded outputs. Understanding Nexus mainly matters for tracing why a given OpenAIRE tool exists and how it is funded and maintained going forward under EOSC.

How it differs from adjacent concepts

vs. Argos (OpenAIRE) — Argos is one of the services Nexus bundles, specifically for DMPs; Nexus is the umbrella covering Argos plus several unrelated services.
vs. Zenodo — Zenodo predates Nexus and is a separate CERN/OpenAIRE-run repository service, not itself part of the Nexus brand, even though it is one of the tools referenced in the bundled portfolio.

References

OpenAIRE Nexus project page, openaire.eu.

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