Starting immediately, Springer Nature will provide OpenAIRE, an EU organisation that facilitates openness in scholarly communication, access to its full-text articles and chapters, regardless of their open access status and access rights. This will enable OpenAIRE to extract links from articles, research data and other scholarly outputs using text and data mining algorithms. Such links between research objects can then be used by both Springer Nature and OpenAIRE to provide searches and statistics through their respective portals and will be made freely available via nature.com, link.springer.com, OpenAIRE Explore and Scholexplorer. Through this collaboration the partners aim to foster discoverability of datasets linked to publications and vice versa, which advances research by supporting reuse, and making datasets easier to find and access.
Although there has been a tremendous growth in the amount of research information available, this does not always equate to an increase in knowledge. By applying value added tools to enrich information and links, researchers are able to get a clearer and richer overview of the research they are analysing, for example, related datasets, project information and even the technical tools used to carry out the research. This collaboration uses the power of mining to tools to extract and organise information from a large corpus of publications which creates a thriving and rich research resource.
Grace Baynes, VP Research Data & New Product Development, Springer Nature, said: “By opening up research – both articles and data – and the connections between them, we hope to facilitate interdisciplinary research, and allow researchers to communicate and collaborate more effectively. Springer Nature is firmly committed to furthering Open Research including Open Data. Making datasets more discoverable to readers supports usage and citation, providing authors with credit for sharing their data and making it more worthwhile. We are delighted to collaborate with OpenAIRE to create a joined up scholarly research landscape, and hope we can build the evidence base for the value of linking datasets to publications.”
Natalia Manola, Managing Director of OpenAIRE, said: “The mission of this collaboration is to support the development of new areas of knowledge, respond to the existing needs of the research community, and to make information accessible around the globe. As a European pioneer that fosters cultural change to Open Science practices, we are delighted to be cooperating with the most significant open access research publisher and enable promising outcomes for the research and development, and open science communities.”
