OpenAIRE: Open Science as-a-Service

Overview:

Open Science is an emerging vision, a way of thinking, whose challenges always gaze beyond its actual achievements. Today’s scientific communication ecosystem lacks tools and practices to allow researchers to fully embrace Open Science and several initiatives world-wide are trying to mitigate this gap. On this respect, the OpenAIRE infrastructure aims at providing technological and social bridges needed to deliver services enabling uniform exchange of metadata about research artefacts (literature, data, and methods), with semantic links between them, across research communities and content providers in scientific communication. 

This presentation will introduce more in detail the OpenAIRE’s concept of “Open Science as a Service” (OSaaS). OSaaS will be realized upon and extending OpenAIRE existing services, delivering out-of-the-box, on-demand deployable tools for Open Science. Specifically, OpenAIRE will enrich the portfolio of its e-infrastructure production services with a “Research Community Dashboard Service” and a “Catch-All Notification Broker Service”. 

Research Community Dashboard Service: The service will offer publishing, interlinking, packaging functionalities to enable them to share and re-use their research artifacts (introducing “methods, e.g. data,software, protocols). This effort, supported by the harvesting and mining “intelligence” of the OpenAIRE infrastructure, will provide communities with the free tools they need to effectively evaluate and reproduce science. 

Catch-All Notification Broker Service: The service will endow the scientific communication infrastructure with information exchange mechanisms based on subscription and notification. Scientific communication data sources will be able to exchange information on published artefacts, be them literature, data or methods, and relationships between them, by “publishing” them to the Broker Service, which in turn will route them to the interested data sources. The service will build on synergic efforts from several organizations (OpenAIRE-EU, Jisc-UK, SHARE-US, and others) and will engage the community on defining interoperability guidelines (protocols and exchange formats), data source managers to consider the enrichment of their local collections with links to other possibly remote artefacts. 

OpenAIRE will employ its active and effective network of NOADs to engage research communities and content providers in adopting such services. These combined actions will bring immediate and long-term benefits to scholarly communication stakeholders by affecting the way research results are disseminated, exchanged, evaluated, and re-used.

Target Audience:

Any scientists interested in the debate and vision regarding Open Science publishing to enable reproducibility and transparent evaluation of science would find fertile terrain for discussion, thinking, and feedback. The presentation sketches problems and proposes solutions, framed in a concrete development plan of OpenAIRE services.

Benefits for Audience:

The presentation presents the "publishing" challenges introduced by Open Science and the barriers the current scholarly communication infrastructure poses to their implementation. Solutions an ideas have been debated but not yet seriously taken into account by the community. The presentation describes plans on how to implement and deliver concrete out-of-the-box Services to help scientists and scholarly communication to gradually evolve and adapt to Open Science principles. 

Topic 2: Services enabling research