OpenAIRE's DOIBoost - Boosting CrossRef for Research

Research in information science and scholarly communication strongly relies on the availability of openly accessible datasets of scholarly entities metadata and, where possible, their relative payloads. Since such metadata information is scattered across diverse, freely accessible, online resources (e.g. CrossRef, ORCID), researchers in this domain are doomed to struggle with metadata integration problems, in order to produce custom datasets of undocumented and rather obscure provenance. This practice leads to waste of time, duplication of efforts, and typically infringes open science best practices of transparency and reproducibility of science. In this article, we describe how to generate DOIBoost, a metadata collection that enriches CrossRef (May 2018) with inputs from Microsoft Academic Graph (May 2018), ORCID (Dec 2017), and Unpaywall (Dec 2017) for the purpose of supporting high-quality and robust research experiments, saving times to researchers and enabling their comparison. To this aim, we describe the dataset value and its schema, analyse its actual content, and share the software Toolkit and experimental workflow required to reproduce it. The DOIBoost dataset and Software Toolkit are made openly available via Zenodo.org. DOIBoost will become an input source to the OpenAIRE information graph.