Product Overview: OpenAIRE
Introduction
OpenAIRE is a European project dedicated to supporting the Open Science movement by establishing an open and sustainable scholarly communication infrastructure. It serves as a comprehensive research information platform designed to facilitate the management, analysis, and dissemination of research outputs across various stakeholders, including researchers, research support organizations, funders, and content providers.
Key Features and Functionality
Infrastructure and Data Management
- OpenAIRE operates on a technical infrastructure that harvests research outputs from connected data providers, utilizing the scalable D-NET software. This infrastructure supports the aggregation, management, and interaction with diverse data sources, including repositories, registries, and other databases.
- The platform performs automated and semi-automated data curation processes, including data normalization, de-duplication, and enrichment. It also incorporates knowledge inference algorithms to analyze and link research objects, such as publications, datasets, and software.
Services for Stakeholders
- Integrated Scientific Information: OpenAIRE provides a unified platform where publication, dataset, and project information for each funder, project, or content provider are aggregated in one place. This makes research more accessible, findable, coherent, and reusable.
- Training and Support: The platform offers training sessions and support on Open Science practices and policies through a network of National Open Access Desks (NOADs) present in every EU country and beyond. These local experts promote and implement Open Access and Open Science policies.
Tools and Resources
- Project Reporting: OpenAIRE enables easy project reporting by linking dissemination activities, publications, presentations, or communications to the corresponding research funding. This facilitates transparent and efficient reporting.
- Monitoring Open Access Trends: The platform provides tools to monitor trends in Open Access to research data and publications, helping stakeholders track the impact and adoption of Open Science practices.
- Open Science Helpdesk: OpenAIRE offers an open science helpdesk to assist users with various aspects of Open Science, ensuring continuous support and guidance.
Data Enrichment and Linkage
- OpenAIRE Research Graph: The platform features the OpenAIRE Research Graph, which interlinks over 124 million publications, 1 million research data, and 78,000 research software with researchers, their organizations, funding agencies, and specific research communities. This graph enhances the discoverability and connectivity of research outputs.
- Metadata Exchange and Enrichment: OpenAIRE facilitates the exchange and enrichment of metadata among data providers, ensuring that research outputs are accurately linked and contextualized. This includes entity disambiguation and association to manage different versions or variations of the same entity.
Integration and Interoperability
- ORCID Integration: Through the OpenAIRE EXPLORE discovery service, researchers can easily identify and add their works to their ORCID records, enhancing the transparency and trustworthiness of researcher identification and their outputs.
- Usage Statistics: OpenAIRE provides a usage counts service using the Matomo Open Source Analytics platform, offering reliable and comparable statistics on the usage of repository items. This service supports reporting to stakeholders and provides accumulated usage statistics via a standardized API.
Future and Community Engagement
- OpenAIRE is committed to expanding its services and integrating with other initiatives, such as the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), to further the Open Science ecosystem. The platform aims to provide social and technological ease in delivering services and exchanging metadata across all scientific fields, fostering a collaborative and inclusive research environment.