A vision towards Scientific Communication Infrastructures

The case for an inclusive scholarly communication infrastructure for social sciences and humanities

This article presents a vision for a scholarly communication research infrastructure for social sciences and humanities (SSH). The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the pressing need to access research outputs without the traditional economic and temporal barriers. This article explores the current scholarly communication landscape, assessing the reasons for the slower uptake of open access in SSH research. The authors discuss such frontiers as commercial interests, sources of academic prestige and discipline-specific genres. This article defines and discusses the key areas in which a research infrastructure can play a vital role in making open scholarly communication a reality in SSH: (1) providing a federated and easy access to scattered SSH outputs; (2) supporting publication and dissemination of discipline-specific genres (e.g. monographs, critical editions); (3) providing help with evaluation and quality assurance practices in SSH; (4) enabling  scholarly work in national languages, which is significant for local communities; (5) being governed by researchers and for researchers as a crucial factor for productive, useful and accessible services; (6) lastly, considering the needs of other stakeholders involved in scholarly communication, such as publishers, libraries, media, non-profit organisations, and companies. They conclude that a scholarly-driven, inclusive, dedicated infrastructure for the European Research Area is needed in order to advance open science in SSH and to address the issues tackled by SSH researchers at a structural and systemic level.

Open research data in African academic and research libraries: a literature analysis

Purpose

The paper presents a literature review on research data management services in African academic and research libraries on the backdrop of the advancing open science and open research data infrastructures. It provides areas of focus for library to support open research data.

Design/methodology/approach

The literature analysis and future role of African libraries in research data management services were based on three areas as follows:open science, research infrastructures and open data infrastructures. Focussed literature searches were conducted across several electronic databases and discovery platforms, and a qualitative content analysis approach was used to explore the themes based on a coded list.

Findings

The review reports of an environment where open science in Africa is still at developmental stages. Research infrastructures face funding and technical challenges. Data management services are in formative stages with progress reported in a few countries where open science and research data management policies have emerged, cyber and data infrastructures are being developed and limited data librarianship courses are being taught.

Originality/value

The role of the academic and research libraries in Africa remains important in higher education and the national systems of research and innovation. Libraries should continue to align with institutional and national trends in response to the provision of data management services and as partners in the development of research infrastructures.

The data-literature interlinking service

Purpose

Research data publishing is today widely regarded as crucial for reproducibility, proper assessment of scientific results, and as a way for researchers to get proper credit for sharing their data. However, several challenges need to be solved to fully realize its potential, one of them being the development of a global standard for links between research data and literature. Current linking solutions are mostly based on bilateral, ad hoc agreements between publishers and data centers. These operate in silos so that content cannot be readily combined to deliver a network graph connecting research data and literature in a comprehensive and reliable way. The Research Data Alliance (RDA) Publishing Data Services Working Group (PDS-WG) aims to address this issue of fragmentation by bringing together different stakeholders to agree on a common infrastructure for sharing links between datasets and literature. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper presents the synergic effort of the RDA PDS-WG and the OpenAIRE infrastructure toward enabling a common infrastructure for exchanging data-literature links by realizing and operating the Data-Literature Interlinking (DLI) Service. The DLI Service populates and provides access to a graph of data set-literature links (at the time of writing close to five million, and growing) collected from a variety of major data centers, publishers, and research organizations.

Findings

To achieve its objectives, the Service proposes an interoperable exchange data model and format, based on which it collects and publishes links, thereby offering the opportunity to validate such common approach on real-case scenarios, with real providers and consumers. Feedback of these actors will drive continuous refinement of the both data model and exchange format, supporting the further development of the Service to become an essential part of a universal, open, cross-platform, cross-discipline solution for collecting, and sharing data set-literature links.

Originality/value

This realization of the DLI Service is the first technical, cross-community, and collaborative effort in the direction of establishing a common infrastructure for facilitating the exchange of data set-literature links. As a result of its operation and underlying community effort, a new activity, name Scholix, has been initiated involving the technological level stakeholders such as DataCite and CrossRef.