By Katerina Iatropoulou, Harris Papageorgiou and Dimitris Pappas

OpenAIRE EXPLORE is a discovery portal of Open Science scholarly works that is built on top of the OpenAIRE Research Graph, one of the largest open scholarly record collections worldwide. Recently we updated the look and feel of OpenAIRE EXPLORE and added important features enhancing discovery and navigation by integrating the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) classification and an enhanced OECD discipline/Fields of Science taxonomy along with the relevant scientific literature.

SDGs in and for research

Research and SDGs, share a common passion: to solve problems of humanity within specific domains, find correlations(1) and measure the results of collective work available to policy makers, academics, researchers, and society(2). SDGs are at the core of the academic debate and permeate all scientific disciplines, resulting in a growth in the number of publications on some areas (i.e. climate change) and gaps in others. The recently adopted SDGs Publisher Compact aspires to develop sustainable practices and that publishers act as champions of the SDGs during the Decade of Action (2020-2030). This only highlights the boost of scholarly works researchers working on SDGs.

• SDGs as a monitoring mechanism for R&I: SDGs are linked to societal impact and the classification of research according to them readily provides new indicators and metrics. Research management in universities and policy agencies gradually embeds these new indicators, mixing them with traditional bibliometric ones (e.g., citations, usage) investigating which papers and universities(3) are most influential(4). Moreover, through the adoption of AI, policy makers are able to better shape policies that utilize science as illustrated in the IntelComp project.
  
  
• SDGs as a discovery mechanism: Researchers seek new knowledge, proofs and outcomes, and SDGs provide a new meaningful exploration path to them. They effectively introduce new dimensions, recognising not just the importance of research, but also connect the dots among real-life societal problems (global research redirected towards addressing poverty, reducing inequality, climate change(5)) and academia, and offer additional discovery pathways to new conceptual frameworks and fields

OpenAIRE embraces the SDGs and offers to its users to experience the evolution of scientific knowledge in progress through OpenAIRE EXPLORE.

New discovery pathways in OpenAIRE Explore

OpenAIRE has adopted the UN SDG classification scheme grouping research contributions and has also integrated an enhanced OECD discipline/Fields-of-Science (FoS) taxonomy into the OpenAIRE Research Graph to organize thematically and discover research more effectively. 

Both classifications are powered by the SciNoBo - Science No Borders team from our partner, Athena Research Center and its Artificial Intelligence stack. Using the full capabilities of the OpenAIRE Research Graph (full-texts, citations, references, venues), SciNoBo applies advanced Natural Language Processing and Graph Machine Learning technologies to provide FoS and SDG annotations to research artefacts (check their recent publication here for more details).

In OpenAIRE EXPLORE users can search and browse research on the SDGs and the Fields of science in the following ways.  

• View the whole list of goals on the Sustainable Development Goals dedicated page and the whole FOS Taxonomy in the Fields of Science dedicated page. 

• Use the advanced search by selecting keywords in the SDG or FoS fields.
• Use the SDG or FoS filter available to refine their searches.

Your feedback counts

Using AI to automatically classify the publications is a good way to approach this, but we realise that the human . If you are an author, or you are a knowledgable reader of an article and you have a different opinion on how to classify a paper according to the 17 SDGs (did we miss something? did we got it wroing?), we want to hear from you! Use our feedback mechanism on the publication landing page and send us your comments.

OpenAIRE EXPLORE functionalities

Apart from search and browse functionality in OpenAIRE EXPLORE you may also perform a set of other actions to make your records interconnected in the wider ecosystem:

• Use the ORCID Search and Link Wizard to update your ORCID profile with the research products available in OpenAIRE.
• Link and connect all your research with projects and funding or research communities. The link service uses external APIs reaching out to external research results and linking them to your research.
• Find an OpenAIRE compatible repository to Deposit your research.
• Use the project landing pages to view research products of your projects and enhance them by linking more research products, access their DMPs, download reports and view metrics and statistics. 

Use the organization and data source landing pages to view all related research, metrics and statistics and to download reports.

 Importantly, OpenAIRE EXPLORE offers the possibility to all,
to provide feedback on the categorisation of a publication under a specific classification scheme.