3 minutes reading time (574 words)

OpenAIRE's Research Featured in Italian Bioethics Journal

25 Apr 2025

OpenAIRE's work on promoting Open Science and research integrity was recently featured in the Italian Bioethics Councils quarterly journal "Bioetica - Rivista Interdisciplinare" (Bioethics – Interdisciplinary Journal, Issue 2/2024), one of Italy's leading publications focusing on bioethics and bringing together perspectives on ethical issues in scientific research from multiple scientific sectors.

Our article "OpenAIRE's Role in Promoting Open Science," authored by Gina Pavone, Miriam Baglioni, Alessia Bardi, and Stefania Amodeo, was published following our participation in Italian First National Congress on Research Integrity, held in Rome, on the 27th and 29 January 2025, which gathered experts to discuss crucial aspects of research ethics and transparency.

The article (in Italian) is part of a special section on Ethics and Research Integrity, which includes the Rome Declaration on Research Integrity that was ratified during the congress, and other contributions covering key thematic areas related to research integrity and ethics, such as:

Research governance and institutional frameworks (including congress overview, research units, and infrastructures)

Open science and transparency in research

Economic and theoretical approaches to scientific integrity

Field-specific ethical considerations (archaeology and social sciences)

These contributions were presented as posters at the Italian First National Congress on Research Integrity.

About Our Work

Our work centers on the principle that research integrity requires transparency not only in scientific outputs but also in their metadata, i.e. the information about authors, affiliations, citations, funding, and more that forms the foundation of scientific communication. OpenAIRE has built a scientific knowledge graph (OpenAIRE Graph) that connects hundreds of millions of metadata records from over 100k trusted sources including institutional repositories, data archives, and major research databases. This infrastructure serves multiple purposes:

Enabling the scientific community to easily access and verify research information

Supporting evidence-based monitoring and decision-making processes

Returning control of science monitoring to researchers instead of closed commercial database

Our commitment to transparency is also reflected in how we make all this information accessible - through public APIs, complete datasets published on Zenodo, and user-friendly portals. This approach aligns with the growing international movement toward research integrity and ethical scientific practices, as highlighted in the Barcelona Declaration, which emphasized the need for research information to be open and transparent.

The OpenAIRE Graph provides the foundation for 3 main OpenAIRE services:

EXPLORE: a platform for discovering and accessing research outputs with their associated metadata.

MONITOR: a service tracking research activities and impact, used by funding agencies and institutions.

CONNECT: a platform for custom research community portals for universities, infrastructures, and projects.

As part of our commitment to continuous improvement, OpenAIRE is currently involved in several European Union-funded projects that are expanding our graph's capabilities. Through SciLake (grant N.101058573), we have developed specialized disciplinary portals that make our vast knowledge graph more accessible and relevant to specific research communities in the neuroscience, cancer research, transportation, and energy fields. Our unique approach relies on close collaboration with domain experts, whose insights help us tailor each portal to meet the distinct needs of different scientific communities while fostering opportunities for interdisciplinary work.

Alongside SciLake, we are also advancing our infrastructure through other key projects like FAIRCORE4EOSC, OSTrails, GraspOS, CRAFT-OA, and EOSC Track. Each of these initiatives contributes to our broader mission of making research information more open, accessible, and valuable to the scientific community.