BACKGROUND
Open Science means more than mere Open Access, and Open Access does not mean just journals. Upstream, it means opening the whole research process by giving access to a variety of digital objects, such as methods, software, data and intermediary documents beyond the final peer-reviewed research article or published output. Downstream it means opening the knowledge discipline-based silos, creating bridges among countries and disciplines, and supporting aggregation and reuse along interdisciplinary topics. Developing Open Science entails to go beyond just releasing millions of Open Access documents, but also to interlink them via useful services and build an integrated trusted open knowledge system across disciplines and fields of specialization.
Several projects, especially in Europe, pursue the aim of publishing Open Access research monographs. However, not enough has been done yet to integrate Open Access monographs into the open science ecosystem in a systematic and coordinated fashion. That’s the main goal of High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science (HIRMEOS) project. The project addresses the particularities of academic monographs as a specific support for scientific communication in the Social Sciences and the Humanities and tackles the main obstacles of the full integration of monographs into the European Open Science Cloud. It aims at prototyping innovative services for monographs in support of Open Science infrastructure by providing additional data, links and interactions to the documents, at the same time paving the way to new potential tools for research assessment, which is still a major challenge in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
By improving already existing publishing platforms and repositories participating in the OpenAIRE infrastructure, the HIRMEOS project will increase its impact and help including more disciplines into the Open Science paradigm, widening its boundaries towards the Humanities and Social Sciences and to reach out new fields up to now poorly integrated.
General description
HIRMEOS will prototype and set up a common layer of added value services on top of existing e-publishing platforms for open access monographs. The set of services that will be prototyped will make scattered and loosely connected collections of documents an integrated part of the open science knowledge system at european level by implementing common standards and crosslinking the documents with others and with various types of digital objects related to the research process. The project builds on two combined pillars: integration and innovation. HIRMEOS won’t develop new technologies from scratch but rather use already existing ones and prototype their implementation on the specific types of digital objects that are academic monographs. The technologies used will be the most innovative of the moment although mature enough to be implemented.
Integration
HIRMEOS develops on top of the most common publishing platforms and technologies for open access monographs in the ERA, enhancing the already existing publication infrastructure. It adds services to the platforms and data to the documents they publish. As the platforms are compliant and indexed by OpenAire, the value added by the project to the platform will be reused by OpenAire to integrate better the monographs in the KMS set up by OpenAire infrastructure.
From TRL-6 to TRL-8 : The level of development between the platforms is uneven considering the different services the project aims to implement. Most of the services are implemented successfully on one or two of the platforms participating to the project but none on all of them. Some services have been implemented on different and specific environments but on none of the participating platforms. HIRMEOS will bring all platforms at the same level of development regarding the data services they will offer.
HIRMEOS within the global open science knowledge system
