OpenAIRE Initiative: Providing Access, Monitoring and Contextualizing Open Access Publications

Abstract

The mission of the OpenAIRE initiative is to foster an Open Science e-Infrastructure that links people, ideas and resources for the free flow, access, sharing, and re-use of research outcomes, services and processes for the advancement of research and the dissemination of scientific knowledge. Its scope goes beyond scientific articles, recognizing that to achieve its full potential, hence enable reproducibility and repeatability of scientific process, scholarly communication should ensure access to the whole range of digital products generated by such process, such as research data, software and models. This paper describes the sequence of enhancements applied over the years to the OpenAIRE infrastructure in order to support this vision of scholarly communication. OpenAIRE offers services to collect information about publication, dataset, and software research products from authoritative data sources (e.g. publication/data repositories, CRIS systems) and to reconstruct by mining the semantic links between them, enabling the reconstruction of a research context.