Content acquisition policy

Literature, Datasets, Software, other research products
OpenAIRE accepts the metadata records of all scientific products whose structure respect the model and semantics as expressed by the OpenAIRE guidelines. This means that both Open Access and non-Open Access material will be included and links to other products will be resolved where this is possible (i.e. the provided PIDs have a resolver).

Accession numbers
Datasets with accession numbers (database entries) are not included as OpenAIRE datasets but, when a relationship to product exists, are included as properties of the related products. More specifically, they are included as values of the property externalReference of product metadata; externalReference includes a URL to the splash page, the target web site name, the ID and an ID type (e.g. PDB).

Full-text of scientific literature
OpenAIRE collects Open Access literature product files whenever these are accessible from the URL provided in the metadata record. The literature full-text is used for text-mining purposes. End-users willing to access, download, and read the actual files will not be able to do so from OpenAIRE, but will be forwarded to the original source of deposition. For further information on the use of full-texts, please view OpenAIRE’s ToU.

The OpenAIRE service infrastructure harvests metadata about scholarly communication
products (literature, datasets, software, and other research products) and links between such products from a range of institutional or subject repositories, national and institutional research information portals, aggregators, e-journals, data repositories, and software repositories. In addition, it infers links between literature and such products via advanced text and data mining techniques (TDM). The resulting information graph (i.e. interlinked sets of objects) is intended to favour monitoring of open science and open science publishing workflows (e.g. science reproducibility and transparent assessment).

OpenAIRE services collect metadata about four typologies of products: literature, datasets, software, and “other research products” (ORPs). Metadata can be collected from four main categories of repositories: literature repositories (including institutional/thematic repositories, publishers, and catalogues), data repositories, software repositories, and ORP repositories. As things stands there is no one-to-one relationships between a type of repository and the products it contains, e.g. literature repositories may indeed also contain datasets, software, and ORPs. Accordingly, the aggregation process needs to classify the products collected from a repository in order to assign them to the correct entity class in OpenAIRE. The distribution rules are illustrated in Table 1, which follow vocabularies in the OpenAIRE guidelines and Version 4.0 of DataCite. Please note that such mappings may be modified over time to reflect the general preferences and requirements of the OpenAIRE user community.