OpenAIRE-Nexus Scholarly Communication Services for EOSC users

Project Information

OpenAIRE Nexus

Grant agreement ID: 101017452

DOI

10.3030/101017452

Project closed

EC signature date 1 December 2020

Start date 1 January 2021

End date 30 June 2023

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Research Infrastructures

Total cost

€ 3 999 923,50

EU contribution

€ 3 999 923,50

Coordinated by

OPENAIRE AMKE
Greece

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - OpenAIRE Nexus (OpenAIRE-Nexus Scholarly Communication Services for EOSC users)

Reporting period: 2022-04-01 to 2023-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

OpenAIRE-Nexus brings in Europe, EOSC, and the world a set of services to implement and accelerate Open Science. It supports researchers by embedding Open Science practices (openness and FAIRness) within their scientific workflows. It gives institutions and research communities the tools to make their content more visible and discoverable, and ensure systematic reporting to funders. It assists policymakers with services to better understand the environment and ramifications of Open Science into new incentives, scientific reward criteria, and impact indicators, so as to increase research and innovation potential. To foster innovation, by providing SMEs with open data about scientific production. To this aim, OpenAIRE-Nexus onboards to the EOSC fourteen services, provided by public institutions, einfrastructures, and companies, structured in three portfolios: PUBLISH (catch-all repository; Open Access overlay journal platform; data anonymization; Data Management Plans), MONITOR (Open Science and research impact monitoring; open citation indexes for article-article, article-dataset links; European monitoring of Article Processing Charges, publication usage statistics), and DISCOVER (open catalogue, APIs, and dumps to the OpenAIRE Research Graph of interlinked publications, data, software, projects; discovery portals for communities; validation and brokering services for data sources to improve their metadata). The services assemble a uniform Open Science Scholarly Communication package for the EOSC and their KPIs shows how widely used in Europe and beyond are. The project engages communities and EOSC users in using Nexus services, while at the same time forming synergies with other INFRAEOSC-07 awarded projects, the EOSC-Future project, research infrastructures, einfrastructures, and scholarly communication services to define a common Open Science interoperability framework for the EOSC, to facilitate sharing, monitoring, and discovery of EOSC resources across disciplines.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

* Interconnecting, discovering, tracing, measuring research and its impact *

Preventing monopolies in knowledge infrastructure: subscription revenues decline in the transition to OA, publishers prioritize other sources of revenue, but the growing ownership of data analytics, hosting, and portal services by commercial scholarly publishers is still a concern. The OpenAIRE Research Graph is expected to be a game changer in open scholarly communication and in EOSC, being openly accessible, curated, decentralized, and trusted. The OpenAIRE-Nexus DISCOVER and MONITOR portfolios will favor a global and institutional cultural shift towards open methodologies, collaborative efforts and shared costs, bringing an end to the monopoly of closed, commercial services (e.g. Scopus/SciVal, Web of Science), and opening up the market to smaller innovative players.

Incentives to Open Science - an open metrics infrastructure environment: New credit and impact indicators for reward, career assessment processes, must be identified, possibly within the context of a trusted, open metrics infrastructure. The OpenAIRE-Nexus MONITOR portfolio sets fundamental brick of this infra, through the following community-governed services.

Intelligent, scientific-intent metrics and discovery: In response to the growth rate of scientific articles and related research objects (e.g. data, software), reliable and comprehensive metrics and indicators of the scientific impact of research, research institutions, individual researchers are becoming urgent. The OpenAIRE Research Graph, OpenCitations, ScholExplorer, OpenAIRE-Nexus DISCOVER and MONITOR portfolios introduce novel OS metrics, opening new frontiers on the quality and transparency of research discovery and evaluation.

* Increasing scientific collaboration through digital transformation and open science *

Open Science publishing workflows would benefit from an “horizontal” cross-community infrastructure. OpenAIRE-Nexus PUBLISH portfolio services advance the status-quo, being connected to EOSC via established or emerging standards (federated AAI) and guidelines (OpenAIRE Guidelines for content providers), supporting overlay journals using existing investments (repository), enabling service to API-deposit into Zenodo.org using Amnesia for GDPR compliance before publishing, linking ARGOS’ DMPs to local policy and infrastructure. Its full portfolio of services brings to research communities the elements to fill the functional gaps, if any, to adopt common polices and guidelines, and to fully embrace uniform open science practices.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

All services brought by OpenAIRE-Nexus are production ready (TRL9) and operational. They report successful Virtual Access and usage KPIs, which show the quality and impact of the services across communities and countries, in Europe and globally. Their integration with the EOSC Core ensures a wider adoption and impact, by integrating with other services to ensure complete scientific workflows, engaging all EOSC users. For example, publishing a dataset anonymized with Amnesia, or an ARGOS’s DMP, or an article in Zenodo.org ensures the object is visible via journals in episciences.org via the OpenAIRE Research Graph, and in turn to the EOSC resource catalogue. All such products are discoverable via the OpenAIRE DISCOVER portfolio of services, via commercial discovery services (e.g. EBSCO), the EC Participant portal, ORCID, and OpenAIRE MONITOR or similar commercial services (e.g. Elsevier’s SciVal and Scopus). Finally, OpenAIRE provides an AAI login service that ensures seamless user access to all OpenAIRE services and the EOSC AAI.

OpenAIRE-Nexus services leverages “synergies between pan-European e-infrastructures operators, leading to harmonised services, improved use of resources and economies of scale across Europe”. To this aim, OpenAIRE-Nexus has been proactively seeking collaboration with the INFRAEOSC-07 projects DICE, EGI-ACE, Reliance, and C-Scale to ensure exchange of practices and guidelines, and to ensure, via an agreement with EOSC-Future, that real use-cases of performing science via the EOSC are delivered. Nexus co-chairs an EOSC Working Group on Research Product Publishing APIs and endorses a WG co-chaired by EGI-ACE on computing continuum. It drafted and signed MoUs with EPOS ad EMBRC and is working with PaNOSC and SSHOC to ensure cross-service integration.

Sustainable growth is key to the long-term success of open science and EOSC. The project work on sustainable developments has led OpenAIRE to adhere to the Principles of Open Science Infrastructures. OpenAIRE-Nexus services rely on existing services, promote their adoption, and avoids redundancy of functionalities and data across the infrastructure. Work is ongoing on business models for Open Science services. All ethical and equity principles are respected.

Furthermore, OpenAIRE-Nexus offers its value-added portfolio services and consulting to new SMEs that explore their business expansion on Open Science (through the EOSC-DIH of EOSC-FUTURE project). It strongly sustains and enhances its support and training activities, that are open to all and FAIR. The material follows up the services progress, goals and objectives, that facilitate services uptake and maintain the trust from our user groups.

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