Skip to main content

News 

Published
May 19, 2020
Author

Follow Us

OpenAIRE COVID-19 Gateway

May 19, 2020

The COVID-19 Open Research Gateway is OpenAIRE's response to enable the scientific community to discover research from different sources around Europe and the world. While we hope the accute COVID-19 epidemic won't be here forever, we expect that research around the topic will be here to stay for a long time: different types of data from different domain disciplines will be produced to be used in research and in policy making. Having a single access point, a Gateway, as a result of collaborative data and knoweldege is important, especially as this is driven by open science practices.

 

In a nutshell: The OpenAIRE COVID-19 Gateway aims to aggregate COVID-19 records (publications-data-software-other research outcomes), link them together and provide a single access point for their discovery and navigation. We will tag content from the existing scholarly communication infrastructure (10,000+ data sources) and identify and furrther aggregate additional sources as these become available, especially via our collaboration with (European) disciplinary research infrastructures and international alliances. All COVID-19 related research results will be linked to people, organizations and projects, later on with services and facilities, providing a good overview and cross-disciplinary navigation of the related research eco-system.

How it works:  The COVID-19 Open Research Gateway is an entry point to scientific products (publications-data-software-protocols-etc.) related to the epidemic (disease, virus) and all future research around it (e.g., social). It aggregates bibliographic data for research data and publications coming from relevant and authoritative sources worldwide, research products COVID-19 related and uploaded to Zenodo with suitable licenses, and research outputs available in the OpenAIRE Research Graph.  

OpenAIRE4COVID 19 arch

Data is included in the Gateway via the following methods:

1 Mining the content from OpenAIRE 10,000 + trusted sources for related terms "COVID-19", "SARS-CoV-2", "2019-nCoV", "Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2" or subjects with MeSH term "COVID-19" (code C000657245).  We will be updating the terms periodically per scientific community guidance.

2 Direct feed from the newly created Zenodo COVID-19 Community.  The community is fully moderated by OpenAIRE team, but we are looking for experts to help us moderate thee incoming flow (see below).

3 Aggregation from European and global trusted COVID-19 souces as these emerge during/after the crisis.  Check our public up-to-date list of data sources.

If you want to suggest scientific material with bibliographic information as well as projects and funding opportunities, please use this form.

4 Authenticated users linking scientific products to the "COVID-19" community (moderated).  Trust and quality is an issue for us all and we would like to invite expets to collaborate with us and work in our team to help us in identifying the right sources, curate the COVID-19 Graph and moderate user interaction (see below).

5 All information will be available via a target set the OpenAIRE APIs (LOD, REST) or via periodic dumps in Zenodo.

 

How does it fit in the European COVID-19 efforts?  We are in collaboration with ongoing efforts from pan-European Research Infrastructures (see here) and national initiatives. Data being produced and published through them will be harvested, linked to related publications (existing or future), projects, organizations and people. Working with them and following the guidance and developments of the scientific communities (e.g., vocabularies, interoperability for harvesting data) is of key importance to our collective success.

When will it be operational? The Gateway is live since mid May. The underlying data will be improved continuously and enriched in the days and weeks to come.

What is the technology behind it? The Gateway is realised via the OpenAIRE Research Community Dashboard, the OpenAIRE service that offers on-demand, customizable Open Research Gateways for research communities. An Open Research gateway supports researchers at:

  • Discovering and navigating through a community-oriented research graph, obtained as a view over the OpenAIRE Research Graph
  • Accessing statistics about research trends and open science practices of the community
  • Publishing (deposit metadata and files to get a citable DOI) their scientific products within the community boundaries of the OpenAIRE Research Graph via Zenodo.