The OpenAIRE Research Community Dashboard: On blending scientific workflows and scientific publishing

Abstract

Despite the hype, the effective implementation of Open Science is hindered by several cultural and technical barriers. Researchers embraced digital science, use “digital laboratories” (e.g. research infrastructures, thematic services) to conduct their research and publish research data, but practices and tools are still far from achieving the expectations of transparency and reproducibility of Open Science. The places where science is performed and the places where science is published are still regarded as different realms. Publishing is still a post-experimental, tedious, manual process, too often limited to articles, in some contexts semantically linked to datasets, rarely to software, generally disregarding digital representations of experiments. In this work we present the OpenAIRE Research Community Dashboard (RCD), designed to overcome some of these barriers for a given research community, minimizing the technical efforts and without renouncing any of the community services or practices. The RCD flanks digital laboratories of research communities with scholarly communication tools for discovering and publishing interlinked scientific products such as literature, datasets, and software. The benefits of the RCD are show-cased by means of two real-case scenarios: the European Marine Science community and the European Plate Observing System (EPOS) research infrastructure.