Data Journeys Through the Global Research Infrastructure

The Global Research Infrastructure is built on persistent identifiers for people, organizations, articles, datasets, and many other kinds of research objects. It connects tens of millions of objects into an actively growing network of research objects and results that, together, embody open and connected scientific knowledge. The infrastructure is complex and data journeys through it face considerable obstacles. In this growing stage, users must clearly understand these obstacles with related caveats and limitations to reap the benefits effectively. CHORUS combines data from Crossref, ScholeXplorer, DataCite, and ORCID to produce broad views into the infrastructure for funders and publishers, i.e., analysis ready data for the global research infrastructure. The INFORMATE project characterized the CHORUS data journeys through these organizations and connections. Once these were understood, we used the data to address many questions about connected articles and datasets. For example: What projects are funded by multiple agencies; which agencies work together; what repositories are used for datasets resulting from funding by the National Science Foundation or the U.S. Geological Survey; what are temporal relationships between publication of articles and related datasets, or what outputs were connected to a given funder or award? Even with the known limitations the answers to these questions are informative and suggest further interesting questions. As more content is connected through the infrastructure and obstacles are overcome, these answers will improve.

Some of these slides were presented at the NISO Plus Global meeting during September 2024 and in talk IN23C-06 at the American Geophysical Union Meeing in Washington DC during December 2024.