The articles of SciELO journals on the European Commission Open Science platforms

By Abel L. Packer and Gustavo Fonseca

From March 2018 the articles published by SciELO journals will integrate and enjoy the features offered by two important development and operation projects of open access sources of scientific information management of the European Commission supported by the Horizon 2020 program for research funding, technological development and innovation. The first is the OpenAire repository which includes publication metadata, research, projects, and organizations’ data, and serves as reference and support to European open access, open data and open science aligned policies and mandates. The second project implements the OpenMinTeD system (Open Mining Infrastructure for Text and Data) that includes an open service infrastructure oriented to text mining and scientific research data.

In March 2018 the volume of open content operated by OpenAire is notable in quantity, which is expressed by the indexing and discoverability of more than 23 million bibliographic records of scientific publications, of which about 14 million are journal articles. OpenAire also indexes more than 600,000 research data records. These contents are extracted by web crawlers that periodically visit more than 11,000 open access repositories and journals, dubbed “data providers”.

Data providers must meet OpenAire’s requirements to expose or make their content available according to protocols that enable OpenAire crawlers to perform the extraction or harvesting of article metadata and other types of scientific literature, such as research data, or project documents. The protocol followed by OpenAire for extracting metadata from scientific publications is Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting version 2.0 (OAI-PMH v2.0). The content exposed should allow the extraction of metadata required by OpenAire (Set Content) and organized according to the Dublin Core format. One of the metadata is the link to the original content.

In late 2017 and early 2018, SciELO developed the ability to organize the metadata of SciELO articles required by OpenAire in the Dublin Core format and, acting as an aggregator, make them available following the OAI-PMH v2.0 protocol.

OpenMinTeD also operates with content providers, both for publications or research data. However, unlike OpenAire, OpenMinTeD operates with copies of the original data, namely full texts in the case of scientific publications. In order to access full texts and other content types, OpenMinTeD uses OpenAire metadata. That is, data providers for OpenMinTeD must first establish themselves as an OpenAire provider.

At the beginning of 2018, SciELO also developed the OpenMinTeD data provider capacity that will result in the availability of full texts of all articles whose Creative Commons license allows derivative texts.

The OpenMinTeD operational platform is under development, comprising the functions or services of open content availability for text and data mining applications, as well as tools and solutions for exploring content and their results. Data mining consists of computer-programmed processing specialized in exhaustive analysis techniques of unstructured texts and structured data to identify structures, patterns and trends that inform and automate decision-making processes. This function of discovering or revealing structures and patterns from the analysis of texts and data is commonly interpreted as extracting previously unknown knowledge.

The development of SciELO data provider capacity for both OpenAire and OpenMinTeD was supported by a grant of 25 thousand euros contributed by the OpenMinTeD project by means of a public call to support the development of the platform. The SciELO Brazil technical unit, supported by the coordination of SciELO Spain and Oficina Técnica General (OTG) del Plan TL en el área de Biomedicina de la Secretaria de Estado de Telecomunicaciones y para la Sociedad de la Información prepared and submitted a project proposal¹ under the terms of the public call to become a data provider, which was approved by the committee responsible for evaluating the proposals. In summary, the SciELO project requested support for the development of the organization of article metadata according to the Dublin Core format and its disclosure according to the OAI-PMH v2.0 protocol. The project result enriches SciELO’s technology platform. The code is open source, available under a BSD license. It is worth noting that all traffic between the OAI provider and the client is encrypted, using the HTTPS protocol.

The presence of SciELO journal articles in the OpenAire and OpenMinTeD platforms will contribute to the program’s goal of promoting the visibility, use and impact of journals indexed by national SciELO Network collections and the research they communicate. The SciELO program has as principles research communication in open access, networking and quality control in all the instances and stages of the editorial process. The program operates through a journal publishing model that integrates indexing, storage, preservation and retrieval of full texts, publishing and interoperability. In summary, SciELO seeks to maximize the availability and use of journals and articles. In the case of OpenMinTeD, the perspective of identifying new information and knowledge from the analysis of article texts will contribute to increase the visibility and impact of the research results they communicate.

Note

1. Proposal written by Fabio Batalha and Abel Packer titled “Proposal to empower SciELO Network to provide journals article in the OpenMinTED platform through the OpenAire repository” sent to OpenMinTED in 2017.

References

OpenAIRE Guidelines for Literature Repositories [online]. OpenAIRE Guidelines. 2015 [viewed 09 February 2018]. Available from: https://guidelines.openaire.eu/en/latest/literature/index.html

Phase II: call for TDM Software and Knowledge Resources [online]. Open Tenders. 2017 [viewed 09 February 2018]. Available from: https://openminted.bsc.es/

What is Horizon 2020? [online]. European Comission. 2014 [viewed 09 February 2018]. Available from: https://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/what-horizon-2020

External links

Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, Version 1.1: Reference Description <http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/>

OpenAIRE <https://www.openaire.eu/>

OpenAIRE Guidelines <https://guidelines.openaire.eu/en/latest/>

OpenMinTED Glossary <https://vocabularies.openminted.eu/skosmos/omtd_glossary/en/page/OMTDglossary>

Provedor de dados OAI-PMH para Rede SciELO <https://github.com/scieloorg/oai-pmh>

The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting <http://www.openarchives.org/OAI/openarchivesprotocol.html>

Translated from the original in Portuguese by Lilian Nassi-Calò.