Serica: enhancing open scholarly research through collaborative metadata management and assessment

Serica is a multilingual collaborative digital environment for scholars of texts, images and musical documents from the 2nd century BC to the 19th and 20th centuries AD, concerning the Central Asian routes between China and Europe.

The project was developed and designed in collaboration between the company Net7 and the University of Pisa and Turin. It was created to enable a community of researchers to take advantage of a shared platform to enter, manage, review, enrich and share scholarly metadata in an open format.

The article delves into the methodologies employed in the collection, organization, and enrichment of these metadata within the Serica platform. It provides a detailed examination of the tools employed for ensuring accurate representation, discoverability, and interoperability of research materials in an open format. Furthermore, the article highlights how Serica's shared platform encourages scholars from different disciplines to contribute their expertise and insights, facilitating interdisciplinary dialogue and knowledge exchange. Finally, we will focus on some possible applications of scholarly metadata reuse for research evaluation purposes.