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OpenAIRE is pleased to announce an open call for tenders for 80.000 Euros with the aim to seek innovative ideas that will improve the OpenAIRE infrastructure services and/or its overall uptake. Such applications may cover a wide range of aspects, ranging from basic services for scholarly communication at the institutional or national level, to linking OpenAIRE content to external content, to researcher social networks, to mobile applications, etc.

Aim of the calls

The aim of the open tender calls has a dual purpose:

  • to develop applications with special focus on novel ideas that may improve the operation and uptake of the OpenAIRE infrastructure and show how Open Access to publications, data, software and other research artefacts are key in advancing open science and innovation, and
  • to bring the OpenAIRE consortium closer to the innovation community to gauge the trends and ideas of the scholarly communication emerging market.
  • WHAT: 80.000 EUR will be distributed among various topics addressing different levels of the OpenAIRE e-Infrastructure as descibed below in LOT I & LOT II.
  • WHO: We invite individual researchers, SMEs or external (non-OpenAIRE) research organizations from Europe and around the world to make use of the OpenAIRE infrastructure for the creation of innovative services and the adaptation of existing third-party components.
  • WHEN: This call will run until Jan 4, 2018, noon CET. The evaluation period will last 10 days, until Jan 14, 2018. Winners are expected to start work on Feb 1, 2018 with results to be delivered at the latest by May 15, 2018.
  • CONTACT: Do not hesitate to send us any inquiry you may have. Please send an email to the following address and do not forget to specify in the subject the reason for your inquiry: open calls
  • EVALUATION CRITERIA AND SUBMISSION: Listed at the bottom of the page.
Lot I

Repository tools and services

Total amount assigned: 30,000 EUR
To be sponsored: a max of 3 bids – each bid may range from 10-30K EUR

This part of the call addresses the lower level of the infrastructure, i.e., the repository /journal/CRIS platform service providers, and aims to facilitate services that will improve interoperability. We are targeting services that will have a large impact for the community, either covering popular repository used by a broad audience in Europe and the world, or targeting large platforms with proprietary APIs. The aim is to ensure that the repository community uptakes OpenAIRE services at large and include the following, non-exhaustive list of topics:

Implementation and customization of new protocols
Development of the resourceSync protocol for any broadly used repository/journal platforms: DSpace, EPrints, Invenio, OJS, etc. Customization of OAI-PMH interface or other APIs for large aggregators or platforms.
Implementation of OpenAIRE metadata guidelines and OpenAIRE-APIs interaction
Develop services in the form of plugins or modules for repository/CRIS platforms to allow them to become compatible with all specific aspects of the OpenAIRE guidelines.
  • transformation of content from internal data representation into the OpenAIRE metadata format according to the OpenAIRE Guidelines
  • customization of internal data model and user interface (e.g. ingest-form) to store and represent authoritative information from OpenAIRE (e.g., funder information, author identifiers, licenses, etc.) or other sources (e.g., ORCID, CrossRef, PMC Europe).
Integration with OpenAIRE OA Notification Broker
Development of tools for the integration of platforms with the OpenAIRE OA Notification Broker. These tools must conform to the OpenAIRE Broker APIs  in order to accept and validate OpenAIRE notifications about new records relative to the repository, or “enrichments”, i.e., links from repository records to other objects. More specifically tools may include the following functionalities (non-exhaustive list):
  • subscribing / consuming notifications via OpenAIRE APIs
  • semi-automatic verification and matching of notification information with stored information in the repository
  • enrichment of information (metadata) in the repository records.
Lot II

Value-added services

Total amount assigned: 50,000 EUR
To be sponsored: a max of 5 bids – each bid may range from 10-25K EUR

This part of the call addresses the higher level of the scholarly infrastructure, aiming to provide value added services on top of OpenAIRE’s collected data, i.e., the OpenAIRE scholarly communication graph, which consists of more than 22 mi publications, 600K datasets, 15 funders and 700K grant ids. The services must build upon the OpenAIRE APIs (api.openaire.eu).

The following is a non-exhaustive list of suggested services:

Services to enhance scholarly communication
For researchers
  • Improving researcher visibility, e.g. innovative CVs
  • Improving researcher visibility and collaboration, via social researcher networks
  • Identifying (semantic) links from publications to related research artefacts (protocols, methods, software, data) via text mining of abstracts or full texts
  • Developing recommendation systems
  • Developing/applying annotation systems
For funders
  • Analyzing current scholarly graph and identifying open scholarship/open science trends and correlations through provenance, licenses, citation, and other metadata attributes.
  • Research analytics: identifying emerging trends via text mining of abstracts or full texts, e.g., around which new calls could be designed
For organizations
  • Calculating impact assessment for research performing organizations.
Links to other infrastructures
Develop technical or semantic bridges to related infrastructures. Examples include:
Open Education Systems which contain open educational resources or online courses
Science media, e.g., newspapers, researcher blogs, other science channels
  • Public Sector Information (i.e., open government data) to identify links between research and public sectors) through OpenAIRE’s Linked Open Data
  • Wikipedia/Wikimedia/DBpedia (through OpenAIRE’s Linked Open Data).
    Services that improve internal OpenAIRE technologies/mechanisms
  • Open Citation data to improve impact assessment of OpenAIRE data
  • Methods for de-duplication/disambiguation of organizations or authors
  • Text and data mining methods to extract or infer knowledge in order to enhance/enrich metadata (e.g., to improve existing classifications, to enable semantic search, etc.)
  • Crowd sourcing applications to allow users to interact with the OpenAIRE data to enhance/improve the underlying scholarly communication graph (consider use of OpenAIRE AAI where applicable).
Visualization
  • Value added services for visualization which may include 2d/3d visualization, interactive drill downs or zooms, discovery, statistics, analysis, network/graph, measuring impact, etc.
Mobile applications
  • Developing native mobile applications to provide access to OpenAIRE services which may include discovery, use of personal spaces (e.g., watch lists of featured projects or other entities, reading lists, notifications), sharing of research artefacts, etc.

Proposals in this lot will need to consider potential effort for integrating the resulting services into OpenAIRE, or alternatively present a short section of future exploitation of standalone services.

Criteria

LOT I
 
#Descriptionpoints
C1 Alignment with OpenAIRE interoperability standards 5
C2 Appropriateness, feasibility of methodology 3
C3 Risk assessment and timescales 1
C4 Appropriateness of level of staffing, resources, expertise 1
C5 Level of innovation 1
C6 Cost breakdown, price and value for money 3
C7 Project experience and proven track records planning, management, delivery 2
C8 Impact on OpenAIRE services and consumers 3
Total Score19
LOT II
 
#Descriptionpoints
C1 Alignment with the OpenAIRE objectives and promotion of open scholarship 6
C2 Appropriateness, feasibility of methodology 3
C3 Risk assessment and timescales 1
C4 Appropriateness of level of staffing, resources, expertise 1
C5 Level of innovation 3
C6 Cost breakdown, price and value for money 3
C7 Dissemination plan and initiatives 1
C8 Project experience and proven track records planning, management, delivery 2
C9 Impact on open scholarhip, OpenAIRE services and consumers 3
Total Score23

Submission process

Interested partner should submit to this mail a pdf with max 10 pages, at the latest on Jan 4, 2018, noon CET using the folowing template:
  1. Tender title
  2. Contact person and affiliation email, telephone, address
  3. Description of tender proposal
  4. Concept, objectives and tender priority topics addressed
  5. Description of proposed work, rational, use cases, usage scenario
  6. Methodology
  7. Workplan: work, milestones, timeline, expected results
  8. People and experience: details of staff, capabilities, institutional and individual experience
  9. Risk assessment, which risks are foreseen and how they will be managed
  10. Cost information: breakdown of costs excluding VAT , estimated number of days to be contributed to the project
  11. Curriculum Vitae (not included in the 10 pages)
Note
We foresee exceptionally the scenario where, for cases where the required workload exceeds the proposed budget amounts, a single tender might, after unanimous approval of the core committee, be awarded a varying amount different from the default budget cases.