CANADA.EXPLORE: Discovering Canadian research outputs
Dec 16, 2021
OpenAIRE sets up a customized portal that allows users to search, browse and access Canadian research outcomes
Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) entered into a collaboration with OpenAIRE. The aim of the collaboration is to use the OpenAIRE services to identify Canadian research outputs. The work will provide the community with a better understanding of what Canadian-funded publications are openly available. This collaboration involves working with local repositories and journals, as well as the Canadian research funders, to ensure that the necessary information about authors, funders and institutions is included in the metadata of related publications.
1. Identifying through customises text mining/NLP
To overcome the lack of information of Canadian funding information OpenAIRE developed a text mining module capable of identifying highly accurate links between publications and the three main Canadian federal research funding agencies ("Tri-Agency"): Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR); the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC); and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). The mining algorithm takes into account all alternative names and acronyms of these funders, both in English and French. As a next step, the mining module is currently under an update to infer links also to NRC funding.
2. Addressing the issue of Organisation disambiguation
Organisations appear all over the Research & Innovation ecosystem in different shapes and formats: the same organization may appear with different names (e.g., full legal name, Carl short or alternative names, acronym) and different metadata fields in different data sources. Persistent identifiers may be of no help when different data sources identify organizations according to different PID schemas. As this ambiguity greatly affects the building of the OpenAIRE Research Graph, OpenAIRE developed OpenOrgs.
OpenOrgs helps with the disambiguation with both automated processes and human curation: an algorithm does the first part of the work, suggesting duplicated organizations with a certain degree of similarity in their metadata, then, the curator has to confirm or reject the suggestion. This is a key task for creating a solid information space that enables the construction of monitoring services at the institution and - by extension - the regional level. OpenOrgs is available to Canadian members to help them improve the regional coverage and to increase scholarly communication efficiency.
3. Creating the Canadian subset of the OpenAIRE Research Graph
To give a better overview of the collaboration and the effort of both teams, and to provide access to all users to the Canadian research, OpenAIRE set up the customized CANADA.EXPLORE portal available in canada.explore.openaire.eu. Through the portal, a Canadian subset of the OpenAIRE Research Graph is presented.
The search bar allows users to search, browse and access Canadian research outcomes. The home page of the Canadian portal has its own identity with a dedicated logo and colors. Additionally, information about the collaboration with OpenAIRE and statistical numbers about the content is presented. Furthermore, there is a dedicated page for developers on how to use OpenAIRE API to get Canadian results.
The pilot stage of the Canadian-OpenAIRE collaboration has been completed and the next step is to encourage and support all Canadian institutional repositories to adopt the OpenAIRE metadata guidelines and be harvested by OpenAIRE. This next phase was launched with a webinar series to introduce the OpenAIRE services to Canadian stakeholders and provide practical support for repositories to become OpenAIRE compliant. Natalia Manola, CEO of OpenAIRE was one of the speakers at the first webinar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5pmEfn9G4U
Unlock the potential of your country's research outputs with the support of OpenAIRE
We create customised portals for you, with you, and interlink them to the rest of the world.
You give us some simple (meta)data related to your organization function: e.g., funding database, repositories and related projects. All under confidential agreements.
We ingest your data in our system and start the work: we clean and normalize your data, we identify and extract related information, we infer links. In that way, we enhance the OpenAIRE Research Graph with the research of your country.
After the first iteration, you examine our results to ensure you are satisfied with what you see. We refine until you are happy, in an iterative process. As numbers are important, we advise you to take your time and tell us of any deviations. We correct, you check, you approve.
Finally, we set up a customized portal where all the research of your country can be searchable and accessible.
