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

Revisiting the CRIS landscape in Spain

This text is a follow-up to the previous ThinkEPI note on this subject published back in 2019 (De-Castro, 2019). The piece reflects on the two main functions that Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) are aimed to fulfill. These to some extent conflicting functions are in the first place to showcase the research activity conducted within an organization as a practical implementation of Open Science, and then to collect and store institutional research information for internal use in evidence-based decision-making processes. The text argues that both functions are in fact complementary. Moreover, simultaneously pursuing both of them requires an efficient collaboration across systems (technical interoperability) and across the various institutional units involved in the management and administration of CRIS systems (human interoperability). The text explores the present CRIS landscape in Spain under this double-function perspective and highlights some best-practice case studies in terms of this collaboration

Research identifiers: national approaches to ORCID and ISNI implementation

More and more countries are making collected efforts to provide ORCID identifiers for their researchers and encouraging implementation of ORCID iDs into the national and local research information infrastructure. In June 2015, Knowledge Exchange brought together representatives from its five member countries for a Knowledge Exchange Workshop on National approaches to ORCID and ISNI implementation. The aim of the workshop was to share national perspectives on ORCID and ISNI, including the challenges, solutions and lessons learned with regards to implementation of ORCID and ISNI on a national scale. Issues discussed included legal and regulatory challenges, authentication and integration and also outstanding issues of functionality, interoperability, policy and sustainability. This report gives an account of the meeting and presents some outstanding challenges, some possible solutions and begins to take stock and look ahead; what lessons have we learned that should we take into account when moving on to organisational and other identifiers

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

CERIF – Is the standard helping to improve CRIS?

Governments and organizations are creating Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) to follow the growth of the amount of research data, providing tools to collect, preserve and disseminate that data. At the same time, we are facing the appearance of standards designed to regulate CRIS development. Common European Research Information Format (CERIF) is a standard for managing and exchanging research data. There are several types of CRIS – institutional, regional, national and international. In this work we have just considered the national and international types of CRIS worldwide. Only seven of them were CERIF compliant. The aim of this study is to conclude if the use of CERIF is increasing the number of features in CRIS and how deep CERIF-compliant CRIS are adopting CERIF. Applying all the criteria considered in our methodology, only ten CRIS were analyzed, four of which are CERIF-compliant. CERIF tends to increase similarities between CRIS, in terms of its features and its data models. However, the need for customization of such systems leads to various implementations of the standard, creating an opposite effect of the one referred before. CRIS non CERIF compliant have as central focus the researchers. The CERIF takes CRIS to focus also on projects and institutions of the research domain. With this exception, the CERIF doesn’t show an increase of the number of features. We also consider the use of Dublin Core to increase interoperability between CRIS

Handling Repository-Related Interoperability Issues: the SONEX Workgroup

12 pages, 4 figures.-- Contributed to: 2nd DL.org Workshop "Making Digital Libraries Interoperable: Challenges and Approaches" (Glasgow, Sep 9-10, 2010).To be published by Springer in its 'Lecture Notes in Computer Science' series.Sharing of scholarly content through a network of Open Access repositories is becoming commonplace but there is still need for systematic attention into ways to increase the rate of deposit into, and transfer of content across, the OA repository space. This is a report of the work of a small international group, supported by JISC, with remit to describe, analyse and make recommendations on deposit opportunities and use cases that might provide a framework for project activity geared to the ingest of research papers and other scholarly works. The multi-authored, multi-institutional work is put forward as the default, and nine use case actors are listed, as deposit agents, with four main use case scenarios. There is also some comment and pointers to projects in Europe which address some of these use case scenarios.Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)Publicad

Research and Development Workstation Environment: the new class of Current Research Information Systems

Against the backdrop of the development of modern technologies in the field of scientific research the new class of Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) and related intelligent information technologies has arisen. It was called - Research and Development Workstation Environment (RDWE) - the comprehensive problem-oriented information systems for scientific research and development lifecycle support. The given paper describes design and development fundamentals of the RDWE class systems. The RDWE class system's generalized information model is represented in the article as a three-tuple composite web service that include: a set of atomic web services, each of them can be designed and developed as a microservice or a desktop application, that allows them to be used as an independent software separately; a set of functions, the functional filling-up of the Research and Development Workstation Environment; a subset of atomic web services that are required to implement function of composite web service. In accordance with the fundamental information model of the RDWE class the system for supporting research in the field of ontology engineering - the automated building of applied ontology in an arbitrary domain area, scientific and technical creativity - the automated preparation of application documents for patenting inventions in Ukraine was developed. It was called - Personal Research Information System. A distinctive feature of such systems is the possibility of their problematic orientation to various types of scientific activities by combining on a variety of functional services and adding new ones within the cloud integrated environment. The main results of our work are focused on enhancing the effectiveness of the scientist's research and development lifecycle in the arbitrary domain area.Comment: In English, 13 pages, 1 figure, 1 table, added references in Russian. Published. Prepared for special issue (UkrPROG 2018 conference) of the scientific journal "Problems of programming" (Founder: National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Institute of Software Systems of NAS Ukraine

From Method Fragments to Method Services

In Method Engineering (ME) science, the key issue is the consideration of information system development methods as fragments. Numerous ME approaches have produced several definitions of method parts. Different in nature, these fragments have nevertheless some common disadvantages: lack of implementation tools, insufficient standardization effort, and so on. On the whole, the observed drawbacks are related to the shortage of usage orientation. We have proceeded to an in-depth analysis of existing method fragments within a comparison framework in order to identify their drawbacks. We suggest overcoming them by an improvement of the ?method service? concept. In this paper, the method service is defined through the service paradigm applied to a specific method fragment ? chunk. A discussion on the possibility to develop a unique representation of method fragment completes our contribution

Revisitando el panorama CRIS en España

This text is a follow-up to the previous ThinkEPI note on this subject published back in 2019 (De-Castro, 2019). The piece reflects on the two main functions that Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) are aimed to fulfill. These to some extent conflicting functions are in the first place to showcase the research activity conducted within an organization as a practical implementation of Open Science, and then to collect and store institutional research information for internal use in evidence-based decision-making processes. The text argues that both functions are in fact complementary. Moreover, simultaneously pursuing both of them requires an efficient collaboration across systems (technical interoperability) and across the various institutional units involved in the management and administration of CRIS systems (human interoperability). The text explores the present CRIS landscape in Spain under this double-function perspective and highlights some best-practice case studies in terms of this collaboration. Resumen Como continuación a la nota ThinkEPI de 2019 sobre esta misma materia (De-Castro, 2019), este texto reflexiona sobre las dos principales funciones, en cierta medida contrapuestas entre sí, de los sistemas de gestión de la información científica o CRIS. Éstas son por un lado visibilizar la investigación realizada en una organización como aplicación práctica de la ciencia abierta, y por el otro recoger y almacenar información científica de uso interno para la toma de decisiones basadas en la evidencia. Se argumenta que ambas funciones son complementarias y su puesta en práctica simultánea requiere una eficiente colaboración entre los diversos sistemas (interoperabilidad técnica) y las múltiples áreas institucionales involucradas en la gestión y administración de sistemas CRIS (interoperabilidad humana). El texto examina el panorama CRIS actual en España bajo el prisma de esta doble función y destaca algunos ejemplos de buenas prácticas en materia de colaboración