Report on the First Workshop on Linking and Contextualizing Publications and Datasets

Abstract

Contemporary scholarly communication is undergoing a paradigm shift, which in some ways echoes the one from the start of the Digital Era, when publications moved to a digital form. There are multiple reasons for this change, and three prominent ones are: (i) emergence of data-intensive science (Jim Gray’s Fourth Paradigm), (ii) evolving reading patterns in modern science, and (iii) increasing heterogeneity of research communication practices (and technologies). Motivated by e-Science methodologies and dataintensive science, contemporary scientists are increasingly embracing new data-centric ways of conceptualizing, organizing and carrying out their research activities. Such paradigm shift strongly affects the way scholarly communication is conducted, promoting datasets as first class citizen of the scientific dissemination. Scientific communities are eagerly investigating and devising solutions for scientists to publish their raw and secondary datasets – e.g. sensor data, tables, charts, questionnaires – to enable: (i) discovery and re-use of datasets and (ii) rewarding the scientists who produced the datasets after often meticulous and time-consuming e↵orts. Data publishing is still not a reality in many communities, while for others it has already solidified into procedures and policies. Due to the ability to have immediate Web access to all published material, be them publications or datasets, scientists are today faced with a daily wave of new potentially relevant research results. Several solutions have been devised to go beyond the simple digital article and facilitate the identification of relevant and quality material. Approaches aim at enriching publications with semantic tags, quality evaluations, feedbacks, pointers to authority files (for example persistent identifiers of authors, a liation, and funding) or links to other research material. Such trends find their motivations not only from the need of scientists to share a richer perspective of research outcome, but also from traditional and novel needs of research organisations and funding agencies to: (i) measure research impact in order to assess and reward their initiatives, e.g. research outcome must be linked to a liations, authorships, and grants, and (ii) guarantee the results of public research is made available as interlinked and contextualized Open Access material, e.g. research datasets are interlinked to related publications and made available via online data repositories and publication repositories. The most prominent example of such requirements is provided by the European Commission with the Open Access mandates for publications and data in Horizon2020. Finally, researchers rely on di↵erent technologies and systems to deposit and preserve their research outcome and their contextual information. Datasets and publications are kept into data centres and institutional and thematic repositories together with descriptive metadata. Contextual information is scattered into other systems, for example CRIS systems for funding schemes and a liation, national and international initiatives and registries, such as ORCID and VIAF for authors and notable people in general. The construction of Modern Scholarly Communication Systems capable of collecting and assembling such information in a meaningful way has opened up several research challenges in the fields of Digital Library, e-Science, and e-Research. Solving the above challenges would foster multidisciplinarity, generate novel research opportunities, and endorse quality research. To this aim, sectors of scholarly communication and digital libraries are investigating solutions for “interlinking” and “contextualizing” datasets and scientific publications. Such solutions span from publishing methodologies, processes, policies, to technical aspects involving