Periodic Reporting for period 2 - HIRMEOS (High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science infrastructure)
Okres sprawozdawczy: 2018-07-01 do 2019-06-30
What is the problem/issue being addressed?
Unlike scientific articles, research monographs, an important vector for researchers in humanities and social sciences to disseminate the results of their research, have not fully benefited so far from all the advantages of open access digital publishing. If more and more academic books are available online and more and more open access, they remain most of the time subject to the print legacy in terms of formats, interfaces, structuration. That entails a lack of functionalities that makes them less findable, less readable, less usable for the reader and prevent them to be fully integrated in the European scientific ecosystem, eg EOSC.
Why is it important for society?
This situation prevents society to take full advantage from the results of research in social sciences and humanities, which is paradoxical because, unlike scientific articles, research monographs in disciplines such as history, anthropology, arts and the like, providing high level syntheses of the state of knowledge on specific subjects, are written in a such a way that they are immediately accessible to the lay reader.
What are the overall objectives?
The objectives of HIRMEOS project are to develop simultaneously on top of five major open access books platforms (Oapen, OpenEdition Books, Ubiquity Press, Göttingen University Press, EKT e-publishing platform) added value services to improve usability of the books in the open science cloud and more generally on the open web. More concretely, it aims at making them more FAIR through attribution of permanent identifiers (DOI, ORCID, Funding Registry) and addition of metadata from recognized named entities in the full text, by bringing more transparency on the licenses attached to them and the peer-review they were submitted to, by making them openly annotable and by giving to the reader several metrics on their impact and usage.
Unlike scientific articles, research monographs, an important vector for researchers in humanities and social sciences to disseminate the results of their research, have not fully benefited so far from all the advantages of open access digital publishing. If more and more academic books are available online and more and more open access, they remain most of the time subject to the print legacy in terms of formats, interfaces, structuration. That entails a lack of functionalities that makes them less findable, less readable, less usable for the reader and prevent them to be fully integrated in the European scientific ecosystem, eg EOSC.
Why is it important for society?
This situation prevents society to take full advantage from the results of research in social sciences and humanities, which is paradoxical because, unlike scientific articles, research monographs in disciplines such as history, anthropology, arts and the like, providing high level syntheses of the state of knowledge on specific subjects, are written in a such a way that they are immediately accessible to the lay reader.
What are the overall objectives?
The objectives of HIRMEOS project are to develop simultaneously on top of five major open access books platforms (Oapen, OpenEdition Books, Ubiquity Press, Göttingen University Press, EKT e-publishing platform) added value services to improve usability of the books in the open science cloud and more generally on the open web. More concretely, it aims at making them more FAIR through attribution of permanent identifiers (DOI, ORCID, Funding Registry) and addition of metadata from recognized named entities in the full text, by bringing more transparency on the licenses attached to them and the peer-review they were submitted to, by making them openly annotable and by giving to the reader several metrics on their impact and usage.
In the first period of the project, HIRMEOS has successfully implemented permanent identifiers on the five platforms and the automatic recognition and disambiguation of named entities in the full text of the books to improve their indexation. The certification system that enables platforms to fetch badges from the Directory of Open Access Books and display peer-review certificates alongside the books has been developed and is currently being implemented on the platforms. The annotation and metrics systems are almost developed and should be implemented during the second phase of the project. In terms of communication, conference presentations, publications, workshops and webinars as well as a video has been achieved, opening the way for future collaboration with other players in the field (publishers, platforms, research infrastructures, service providers).
HIRMEOS project will increase impact of academic books on the public debate at European level and facilitate the uptake of research in humanities and social sciences by the society at large.