Linked Open Research for Africa – LORA: Connect African research to global infrastructure via the configuration of the OpenAIRE Graph and maximize discoverability, interoperability and tracking of open linked research.
Funding Area: Critical shared infrastructure / Infraestructura compartida critica
Problem Statement: The emergence of digitalization has provided the opportunity to heal externalities of the past and to exploit the vast amount of produced data for science to advance, economies to scale and societies to thrive. Open Science is globally recognized as the means to achieve the shift towards democratization in research and supports the UN’s mission to reaching the Sustainable Development Goals. Relevant policies and implementation actions are introduced across regions, such as the EC’s Horizon Europe requirements and the realization of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). Similarly, the African Open Science Platform (AOSP) is developed to place African scientists at the cutting edge of contemporary, data-intensive science as a fundamental resource for a modern society. This project brings together the scientific communities of Europe and Africa supported by OpenAIRE (EOSC pillar infrastructure) and AOSP Secretariat and Nodes to share knowledge and services on OS implementation. The objectives are to enhance interoperability and discoverability of African research by configuring the OpenAIRE Graph, to then track its evolution for policy intelligence. The two building blocks of actions are: a. Technical and operational, setting the infrastructure to support African stakeholders in discovering, linking and monitoring research. b. Capacity building and community engagement, equipping professionals with the skills and services to foster best practices by their communities.
Proposed Activities: Activity 1 – CONNECT Timeline: 1st November 2023 – 29th February 2024 Beneficiaries: OpenAIRE, AOSP This activity will develop the African gateway, i.e. the African Knowledge Graph and portal, which will offer an entry point to the OpenAIRE Graph for African open linked research (following the example of Canada research: https://canada.explore.openaire.eu/). - Appoint gateway managers who will curate the gateway and serve as the main contact points supporting the African research community. Draw the specifications for the African Knowledge Graph and identify the sources and outputs that will populate the gateway. - Enhance interoperability of African content providers according to the OpenAIRE guidelines. - Configure the OpenAIRE Graph according to AOSP specifications. - Employ text and data mining and deduplicate inferred sources and content to increase quality and classification of data and create connections (also through semantics). - Develop and configure the gateway’s interface (incl. UI/UX). Activity 2 – MONITOR Timeline: 1st March – 30th September 2024 Beneficiaries: OpenAIRE, AOSP This activity leverages the configuration of the OpenAIRE Graph for African research to deliver a tailored monitor dashboard. - Specification of open indicators and metrics for Open Science. - Text and data mining to increase the quality of data and statistics. - Appoint monitor managers and team members who will enhance and curate the dashboard. - Curate metadata of African institutions and universities to enhance data classification suing Openorgs. - Develop and configure the monitoring dashboard interface (incl. data visualizations and UI/UX). Activity 3 - ALIGN Timeline: 1st May 2024 – 30th April 2025 Beneficiaries: AOSP This activity will enable participation of African institutions to EOSC developments with the aim to define a “Commons” framework to align practices. It refers to active involvement in the FAIR assessment governance discussions and the co-creation activities of the forthcoming EOSC project that targets the planning-tracking-assessing scientific knowledge production (https://ec.europa.eu/info/funding-tenders/opportunities/portal/screen/opportunities/topic-details/horizon-infra-2023-eosc-01-03). That might entail attending in-person and online meetings and hackathons and giving input and feedback via means of social science. Activity 4 – TRAIN Timeline: 1st November 2023 – 30th April 2025 Beneficiaries: OpenAIRE, AOSP This activity supports knowledge exchange and capacity building. It runs throughout the project lifetime and extends on: - Co-organising events on the adoption and implementation of Open Science. - Train-the-trainers activities for the management and use of the services. - Training the African scientific community in using the services.
Openness: OpenAIRE subscribes to the principles for open scholarly infrastructure (POSI): https://www.openaire.eu/principles-open-scholarly-infrastructure-openaire-assessment. Furthermore, the project will leverage the communities of practice that both OpenAIRE and AOSP cultivate as well as Research Data Alliance (RDA) connections to engage in knowledge exchange between them and with the broader community. All outputs of activities will be collected in a dedicated Zenodo community and made openly available to the global scientific community under CC-BY license.
Challenges: To this effect, the project partners foresee the following challenges and will be taking the indicated measures to mitigate the risks associated with them. 1. Alignment of cultural approaches in terms of terminology, environment, context, infrastructure, readiness. a. Support mapping the landscape between Europe and Africa and engage in sharing best practices and converging in discussions on a periodical basis to stay up to date. 2. Onboarding of content sources and commitment from repositories a. Create / utilise local repository network to spread awareness on opportunities provided by Scientific Knowledge Graphs. b. Showcase the Dutch example involving the sudden decommission of NARCIS and how Dutch repositories benefited from being OpenAIRE compatible to quickly develop a national portal for Dutch research: https://www.openaire.eu/launching-the-new-research-portal-for-the-netherlands.
Neglectedness: No, there are no other sources of funding for the proposed project. The opportunity provided by the IOI is both needed and timely offered for the European and African STI communities and the development of their Open Science platforms, i.e. EOSC and AOSP, respectively. It will allow us to move things beyond the boundaries that in-kind contributions unavoidable set and nurture a participatory environment of active contributions for shared open infrastructure and skills.
Success: Along with the delivery of the services that we have defined in our proposed activities section (i.e. African gateway and discovery portal, monitor dashboard), we measure the success of our project outputs and activities using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These are: KPI1 No. of publications, data, software in the OpenAIRE Graph: Target = 200.000 KPI2 No. of relationships / links of research outputs and entities in the OpenAIRE Graph: Target = 20.000 KPI3 No. of professionals trained/mentored: Target = 50 KPI4 No. of researchers engaged in events: Target = 500 KPI5 No. of global outreach activities: Target = 9 (2 webinars, 1 MONITOR community call presentation, 2 IDW/RDA presentations, 4 news items/blogs) KPI6 No. of publications (Target = 2)
Total Budget: 25.000 USD
Budget File: pdf
Affiliations: OpenAIRE A.M.K.E.; African Open Science Platform
LMIE Carveout: Yes, the project fits in the LMIE category as it is realised in collaboration with and for the African scientific community, with prominent roles undertaken by South African affiliates – members of the AOSP (AOSP Nodes).
Team Skills: The teams possess all necessary skills to lead the project into completion and furthermore to bring the project outputs into adoption by the relevant scientific communities. OpenAIRE supports Open Science in Europe for more than 15 years and operates the largest Scientific Knowledge Graph for Scholarly Communication on top of which value-added services are built, such as for discovering and tracking linked research, enabling and enhancing interoperability of repositories and creating machine actionable data management plans. OpenAIRE relies on its strong ICT infrastructure and human network of Open Science experts in 35+ countries across Europe, and collaborates to co-design and align best practices at international level with organisations such as Confederation of Open Access Repositories - COAR, KISTI (Korea) and La Referencia (South America). AOSP is founded on the collaboration of African institutions with proven records on the successful technical networking and sharing of computing capacities.
Submission Number: 153
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