UBC Library has added a new research platform, OpenAIRE, to its suite of data discovery systems, making Canadian research data more accessible to scholars in the European Union.
OpenAIRE is a European platform and not-for-profit organisation that supports open scholarship by providing the infrastructure to accumulate, store and link open research from all disciplines.
“OpenAIRE is the EU’s Google Scholar for research objects. It allows researchers in the European Union to see a variety of scholarly outputs, including grants, datasets, articles, books and more,” says Eugene Barsky, Research Data Management Librarian at Koerner Library, who completed this project as part of his sabbatical.
Collaborating with the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (the Alliance), UBC Library has enhanced the Lunaris platform, Canada’s national discovery service for multidisciplinary data, for research data discovery in OpenAIRE under the FAIR principles. Through Lunaris, information about UBC research data—in the form of metadata records—is brought together in a centralized repository, known as a metadata store. These collected metadata records are then made available in different formats, which are used by various discovery services, such as ProQuest, Google Data, DataOne, the US National Library of Medicine, and now EU’s OpenAIRE.
By making research data available in this way, through a single repository and in multiple metadata formats, UBC research reaches a wider audience globally.
“If you have any partner organizations, or know of any disciplinary databases or researchers who want to access more Canadian research data, now we have a way to give them this type of access,” says Barsky. “And scholarly partners, like OpenAIRE, can acquire that metadata in the formats they need for interoperability.”
In simpler terms, interoperability means that different research platforms and systems can easily share, read, and use the same data—no extra work or reformatting required.
There are also plans in the works to add additional enhancements, says Barsky, like map search capabilities: “Our next step is to make Canadian research data accessible to the world in a geospatial format, in addition to other metadata standards.”