New enhancements have just been rolled out for CONNECT and EXPLORE, making it easier than ever to share Open Access research, fine-tune community gateways, and improve discovery. These updates respond to real user feedback and reflect our ongoing work to build powerful, intuitive tools for the scholarly communication community.

Share Open Access Versions in Just a Few Clicks

Available in both CONNECT and EXPLORE, this new feature lets users upload an Open Access version of a publication directly to Zenodo when only non-Open Access versions are found, provided that the user is listed as one of the authors of the publication, with their ORCID ID.

From the product page, simply click “Upload OA version” to deposit your file. The metadata will be filled in automatically and CONNECT users can also publish directly into relevant Zenodo communities.

Users with an account in CONNECT or EXPLORE can consult all their uploads in the “My Uploads” section of their profile, where closed items can easily be found and updated with an OA version.

Enhanced Filters for Smarter Discovery in CONNECT

Finding relevant research just got easier, thanks to a major expansion of filtering options in CONNECT. Whether you’re searching for research products, data sources or projects, you can now narrow your results more precisely.

New filters include:

• For projects: funder, funding stream, project start year, end year, and Open Access mandates
• For data sources: type (according to different aspects such as typology, jurisdiction, if it’s thematic or cross-disciplinary), language, compatibility with the OpenAIRE Guidelines, and provenance
• For research products: filter by affiliated organisation

Users with a CONNECT Premium plan can also now search for organisations within their community, view the projects they participate into, and access their persistent identifiers (e.g. ROR.org) for easier tracking and linking.

These improvements make searches faster and results more relevant, especially in large, diverse communities.

Improved Patent Coverage

The OpenAIRE propagation algorithm has been extended to include in community gateways any patents that are linked to a research product of a community. We have identified additional 10K patents related to research communities. Some communities increased their coverage of patents of about 100%.

Greater Control for Gateway Managers

Several CONNECT improvements give managers more autonomy in curating and presenting their community’s work:

• Affiliations overview: Gateway managers can now view and validate which organisations are included based on affiliation criteria. Previously this required assistance from the CONNECT team, now it’s fully self-service via the admin dashboard.
• Customisable homepage plugin: Managers are no longer limited to showing just nine organisations on their gateway homepage. You can now decide how many institutions to display, offering more flexibility in how your community is presented.
• Tagging for sub-communities: CONNECT has also released a way to tag research products to not just a main community, but to specific sub-communities. For instance, within a neuroscience community, outputs can be assigned to a neuroinformatics subgroup, making thematic organisation more precise. Before this feature was released, it was tested with partners in the SciLake project, which was presented during the 10th CONNECT Community Call.

Improved Accessibility for the CONNECT Portal

The main CONNECT website (connect.openaire.eu) is now more accessible thanks to the integration of the UserWay plugin. This now ensures that the website is compatible with screen readers and other assistive technologies and easily configurable by those with visual impediments. This plugin is in the process of being integrated into all OpenAIRE service websites.

More Coming Soon

A few more features for CONNECT are currently in development and will be released in the coming months:

• Richer organisation landing pages: Soon, when you click on an organisation, you’ll see more details including its projects, data sources, and associated research products. Future improvements will also include parent-child organisation hierarchies (e.g., universities and their departments) and statistics similar to those available for communities.
• Extended configuration options: Gateway managers will have additional options to populate the gateway with relevant research products of the OpenAIRE Graph. In addition to the available criteria, they will be able to select the products based on their access right, type, and language.

These new features are just the beginning. We’ll continue working closely with users to shape the future of OpenAIRE services, stay tuned for more updates soon!