Webinar on how to use OpenAIRE to search interlinked scientific results
New Season: The representatives of OpenAIRE in Greece and Cyprus held a successful webinar focused on the discovery of Open Science scientific results. They invited Konstantina Galouni, product manager in OpenAIRE, and George Papanikos, CTO of CITE, to inform the Greek and Cypriot academic and research communities about OpenAIRE Explore service and Open Science Lens web application. The webinar was attended by 178 Greek and Cypriot researchers, students, academic staff and librarians.
The power of the OpenAIRE Graph
Konstantina explained that OpenAIRE Explore is a service to find any scientific information someone needs, such as research products like publications, datasets, software, presentations, grants, funding organisations, as well as relations with other relevant scientific information, products or activities. The source powering their discovery is the OpenAIRE Graph, serving as a semantic graph database that retrieves information collected by trustworthy sources like open access journals and repositories, exploits it and produces new findings. Today, OpenAIRE Graph contains 181 million publications, 62 million research data, 388 thousand software items, 134 thousand data sources linked with 3 million grants and 200 thousand organisations.
SEARCH-LINK-DEPOSIT with EXPLORE
Kostantina described how someone can search for the desired information using the service's main functionalities: search, link and deposit.
Users can search by keywords or persisted identifiers, but also by Fields of Science (FoS) for thematic classification of results or by Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for classification based on the world challenges identified by the UN, e.g. poverty or education. They can also download the results of their searches and use them to produce reports or further exploit them.
Every result has a dedicated page that contains basic information about the produced research (e.g. title, author, project), but also more details about the source where it is retrieved from (e.g. scientific journal, GitHub repository) and statistics relevant to academic (citations) and social outreach (e.g. Twitter). Project results have interconnected information about delivered products, e.g. publications, data, software, Data Management Plans (DMPs), and other research products.
Another important functionality is linking information contained in the OpenAIRE Graph to improve and enrich it. That may be linking two research products together or linking a research product with a community or a project. The "ORCID search & link wizard" is very famous as it gives authors the possibility to find and claim in their ORCID account any publication, data, software that they have produced.
To support sharing of results, users can deposit to the most suitable repository found in OpenAIRE or to Zenodo which is OpenAIRE's main repository hosted by CERN.
Get access to EXPLORE from everywhere with Open Science Lens
George continued with a presentation about Open Science Lens that is a web application to search EXPLORE. The app is available as an add-on in Google chrome web store and Microsoft edge store and can be installed as a browser extension.
He explained that the app is an easy way to access interlinked scientific results in Open Access from the web. That opens up any paywalls found when searching for scientific information in different websites and provides users with useful information and links about where to find and how to access the desired results.
Takeaways
At the end of presentations, both of the speakers gave an example for each service.
A clinical researcher suggested a search by keywords: "etiology endometriosis". EXPLORE produced many results according to keywords that pointed not only to papers in PubMed but also to datasets in repositories and projects that had worked on the topics, incl. their results. That way, the participants got a more comprehensive picture about the different elements and products of the research that resulted in papers about etiology endometriosis. During the demo, it was stressed that searching is available to everyone, so no log in is required, but that an OpenAIRE account is needed to use the link function, eg linking a paper to an ORCID account.
Regarding Open Science Lens, participants saw live where they can find the application and how the app works after installation to their browser. As shown above, someone searched Google for a DOI and from the results page, they are able to get to where the file is and read or download it.
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