The need for ‘Diamond Engagement’ around open access to high quality research output

This paper advocates for a co-ordinated cultural shift in their engagement with access to resources in order to make peer-reviewed articles available to a wider audience. This Paper addresses two audiences: scientists, especially those who have been traditionally more resistant to the OA approach, and policy makers. The Scientific Committee is well aware of the difficulties that some research communities face in engaging with the OA approach and would like to offer a way forward to address the current status quo. Social scientists in particular have been struggling with the discussion on OA, given the length of time that the current quality standards and good practice for publication took to set up. The community of researchers perceives that these standards are now guarded by the peer-reviewed ranked journals which do not offer OA for either articles or books, a situation that is certain to persist for some time.   The other important aspect is that payment of Article Processing Charges (APCs) to journals for OA publication is often unaffordable given the limited resources available to the social sciences disciplines. In this context, this paper illustrates how the deposition of articles in public repositories can be beneficial to the research community. At the same time, this Paper encourages policy makers to better invest in the harmonisation of research information metadata standards across Europe using existing public infrastructures, and to ensure good quality of records, interoperability and discoverability. It also links the discussion of OA with an issue that is crucial in both research and policy agendas: demonstration of the impact of publicly-funded research

Development of Grid e-Infrastructure in South-Eastern Europe

Over the period of 6 years and three phases, the SEE-GRID programme has established a strong regional human network in the area of distributed scientific computing and has set up a powerful regional Grid infrastructure. It attracted a number of user communities and applications from diverse fields from countries throughout the South-Eastern Europe. From the infrastructure point view, the first project phase has established a pilot Grid infrastructure with more than 20 resource centers in 11 countries. During the subsequent two phases of the project, the infrastructure has grown to currently 55 resource centers with more than 6600 CPUs and 750 TBs of disk storage, distributed in 16 participating countries. Inclusion of new resource centers to the existing infrastructure, as well as a support to new user communities, has demanded setup of regionally distributed core services, development of new monitoring and operational tools, and close collaboration of all partner institution in managing such a complex infrastructure. In this paper we give an overview of the development and current status of SEE-GRID regional infrastructure and describe its transition to the NGI-based Grid model in EGI, with the strong SEE regional collaboration.Comment: 22 pages, 12 figures, 4 table

A platform for discovering and sharing confidential ballistic crime data.

Criminal investigations generate large volumes of complex data that detectives have to analyse and understand. This data tends to be "siloed" within individual jurisdictions and re-using it in other investigations can be difficult. Investigations into trans-national crimes are hampered by the problem of discovering relevant data held by agencies in other countries and of sharing those data. Gun-crimes are one major type of incident that showcases this: guns are easily moved across borders and used in multiple crimes but finding that a weapon was used elsewhere in Europe is difficult. In this paper we report on the Odyssey Project, an EU-funded initiative to mine, manipulate and share data about weapons and crimes. The project demonstrates the automatic combining of data from disparate repositories for cross-correlation and automated analysis. The data arrive from different cultural/domains with multiple reference models using real-time data feeds and historical databases

Quality interoperability within digital libraries: the DL.org perspective

Quality is the most dynamic aspect of DLs, and becomes even more complex with respect to interoperability. This paper formalizes the research motivations and hypotheses on quality interoperability conducted by the Quality Working Group within the EU-funded project DL.org (<a href="http://www.dlorg.eu">http://www.dlorg.eu/</a>). After providing a multi-level interoperability framework – adopted by DL.org - the authors illustrate key-research points and approaches on the way to the interoperability of DLs quality, grounding them in the DELOS Reference Model. By applying the DELOS Reference Model Quality Concept Map to their interoperability motivating scenario, the authors subsequently present the two main research outcomes of their investigation - the Quality Core Model and the Quality Interoperability Survey

DRIVER Technology Watch Report

This report is part of the Discovery Workpackage (WP4) and is the third report out of four deliverables. The objective of this report is to give an overview of the latest technical developments in the world of digital repositories, digital libraries and beyond, in order to serve as theoretical and practical input for the technical DRIVER developments, especially those focused on enhanced publications. This report consists of two main parts, one part focuses on interoperability standards for enhanced publications, the other part consists of three subchapters, which give a landscape picture of current and surfacing technologies and communities crucial to DRIVER. These three subchapters contain the GRID, CRIS and LTP communities and technologies. Every chapter contains a theoretical explanation, followed by case studies and the outcomes and opportunities for DRIVER in this field

Scientific Output from Latin America and the Caribbean – Identification of the Main Institutions for Regional Open Access Integration Strategies

Latin America is a region in which two thirds of the investment in research and development are funded by State resources. It can be foreseen that in the near future governments in the region will encourage and promote, or require by law or mandates, that scientific output from the region become visible and accessible in open access repositories and portals. This paper presents the results of a survey to identify the institutions of the region with the largest volume of scientific output and most exposure of their output on the Web, in order to help make those institutions visible to national, regional and international organizations involved in open access strategies and programs in Latin America and the Caribbean. The results show a leading position by universities from Brazil; a strong presence of universities from Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Chile and Venezuela, and some presence of universities from Ecuador, Peru, Costa Rica, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Urugua

Medical Virtual Public Services

The healthcare enterprises are very disconnected. This paper intends to propose a solution that will provide citizens, businesses and medical enterprises with improved access to medical virtual public services. Referred medical services are based on existing national medical Web services and which support medically required services provided by physicians and supplementary health care practitioners, laboratory services and diagnostic procedures, clinics and hospitals’ services. Requirements and specific rules of these medical services are considered, and personalization of user preferences will to be supported. The architecture is based on adaptable process management technologies, allowing for virtual services which are dynamically combined from existing national medical services. In this way, a comprehensive workflow process is set up, allowing for service-level agreements, an audit trail and explanation of the process to the end user. The process engine operates on top of a virtual repository, providing a high-level semantic view of information retrieved from heterogeneous information sources, such as national sources of medical services. The system relies on a security framework to ensure all high-level security requirements are met. System’s architecture is business oriented: it focuses on Service Oriented Architecture - SOA concepts, asynchronously combining Web services, Business Process Management – BPM rules and BPEL standards.Business Process Management, Service Oriented Architecture, Application Integration, Web services, information technologies, virtual repository, database.