OpenScience-as-a-Service - European Marine Science Community

This presentation was part of Session "Delivering a Global Open Science Commons" at the Scientific Data Conference (SciDataCon) 2018, during the International Data Week (IDW) 2018, in Gaborone, Botswana.

Open Science is around the corner. Some see it as a way to speed up the research life cycle, enhance collaborations, and improve scientific quality. Others see it as a means to optimise the costs of science, leverage innovation, and increase rewards. There are several challenges ahead, however, in order to achieve this emerging vision. Here, we present a series of tools and practices developed to address these challenges and fully embrace Open Science.

OpenAIRE is a network of libraries, repositories and publishers that support Open Access policies. It goes beyond the traditional publications aggregator by interconnecting different entities related to scholarly communication, including articles, research data, funding bodies, organizations and individual scientists. OpenAIRE allows users to navigate within a rich information space, and progressively provides a wide range of Open Science services.

OpenAIRE started as a support mechanism for the European Commission’s open access policies, with the aim to become the scholarly communication hub in Europe. In 2017, OpenAIRE-Connect (H2020) introduced the concept of Open Science as a Service (OSaaS) on top of the existing OpenAIRE infrastructure, adopting an end-user driven approach via the initial involvement of five prominent research communities. It enriches the portfolio of the OpenAIRE infrastructure with a Research Community Dashboard Service and a Catch-All Notification Broker Service.

The Research Community Dashboard helps research communities (individuals, institutions and funders) to publish, claim and monitor the impact of their research outputs (articles, methods, data), and in turn augment and disambiguate the commons of open access content providers. The Catch-All Notification Broker helps content providers to improve the findability, accessibility, interoperability and reuse of their holdings by research communities. Both services are built as on-demand tool boxes that can be customised and re-used by different communities and providers, adapting to the different practices and maturity levels, and yet leading to an interoperable science commons ecosystem. The proposed lightning talk will exemplify Open Science as a Service for the European Marine Science community.