What is CONNECT?
OpenAIRE CONNECT is a platform-as-a-service that empowers research communities, organisations, and infrastructures to effortlessly create, configure, and manage custom web portals. These portals facilitate the collection and sharing of research outcomes and Open Science practices, tailored to the needs of specific audiences. Supporting both public and private modes, OpenAIRE CONNECT integrates Open Science to foster collaboration, while offering quick setup and easy branding customization. In essence, it’s a virtual gateway for your community—defined exactly as you see fit. OpenAIRE CONNECT significantly improves the visibility and dissemination of research within and beyond the community, connecting it to the wider scientific landscape.
Mission
The mission of OpenAIRE CONNECT is to empower research communities, organizations, and infrastructures to embrace Open Science by providing seamless, customizable tools to create, manage, and share their research outputs. CONNECT aims to enhance the visibility, accessibility, and impact of research through interoperability, transparency, and collaboration, fostering a global ecosystem where knowledge is open, interconnected, and impactful.
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Enable Customization: Provide research communities with tools to design tailored gateways that reflect their unique identity, priorities, and audiences.
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Enhance Research Discoverability: Boost the visibility of datasets, publications, and software by connecting outputs to a global Open Science network.
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Simplify Open Science Compliance: Support communities in aligning with FAIR principles and funder mandates through easy-to-use, integrated workflows.
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Promote Interoperability: Ensure seamless integration of research outputs with diverse systems, infrastructures, and global repositories.
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Foster Collaboration: Create a platform for connecting researchers, organizations, and infrastructures, enabling knowledge sharing and co-creation.
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Facilitate Impact Measurement: Provide tools for tracking and analyzing research outputs to showcase their contribution and influence in the global scientific landscape.
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Support Scalability: Offer a robust, flexible infrastructure that grows with the needs of communities, whether they are local initiatives or large-scale international collaborations.
How CONNECT Supports Open Science?
OpenAIRE CONNECT empowers researchers and communities to embrace Open Science by facilitating seamless discovery, sharing, and connection of research outputs. Here are three essential ways CONNECT advances Open Science:
Search for Research Products
Researchers can discover publications, datasets, and software relevant to their community through the Community Gateway. This tailored view of the OpenAIRE Graph is curated by experts to help users navigate the overwhelming volume of data and literature, ensuring they find the most pertinent resources.
Deposit and Publish Openly
CONNECT enables researchers to deposit their outputs in suitable repositories, adhering to Open Access and Open Science principles. Whether it’s publications, datasets, or software, CONNECT helps identify the right repository for every research product, supporting data management planning and compliance with Open Science mandates.
A special integration with Zenodo, powered by OpenAIRE, enables direct deposits, ensuring an effortless and Open Science-compliant publishing experience.
Link Research Outputs
Researchers can link their outputs to their community, funding sources, and related research products, contributing to a growing and interconnected record of knowledge. These links enhance transparency, traceability, and the collaborative value of Open Science practices.
Explore all features
The OpenAIRE CONNECT Gateway offers a comprehensive suite of features designed to support and empower research communities in showcasing their results and advancing Open Science activities and practices.
Create your own menu, edit pages, and adapt to your visual identity with logo, banner, background, buttons, colors. Edit the home page to include your personalised content. Managers of gateways with Advanced or Premium plan can also request new pages.
The OpenAIRE CONNECT Gateway provides powerful search and browse capabilities to support diverse research needs. Users can explore research products, projects, and data sources using advanced filters such as product types (e.g., publications, data, software), Fields of Science (FoS), and UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Communities can further tailor the search functionality by enabling or disabling specific entity types.
For more advanced needs, OpenAIRE CONNECT offers options to organize and explore by sub-communities, such as thematic or geographical nodes, with dedicated search tools (available in Advanced plans). Additionally, a feature to search and filter research products by organisation will soon be introduced with the Premium plan.
Allow your users to add research products to the gateway, create links among them and project grants (see this guide), and claim their authorship with ORCID (guide).
OpenAIRE CONNECT utilizes advanced text mining algorithms to extract and analyze data, providing deep insights and comprehensive research intelligence. For more information on the text mining algorithms, visit the OpenAIRE Graph website.
Additionally, OpenAIRE offers customized text mining solutions tailored to your community’s research products. By participating in tests and fine-tuning the algorithm, you can help optimize its precision and recall. This feature is available for CONNECT Advanced and Premium users.
OpenAIRE CONNECT offers a set of default charts to track the uptake of Open Science practices within your community, including metrics on Open Access publications, datasets, geographic distribution, publications with persistent identifiers, download counts by year, and access rights over time. Additionally, customised charts are available for organisations within your research community, providing tailored insights. This feature will be available soon for CONNECT Premium.
Who is it for?
Research Initiatives, University Alliances & Networks
That require a single entry-point to all research outcomes of their alliance members.
Research Communities & Projects
That need to create personalised research gateways for a specific topic and share the information with their peers.
Research Infrastructures
That require support in enhancing discovery within their field, showcasing their impact, and streamlining reporting processes.
Researchers
Who can freely access publicly available CONNECT gateways.
How to build your Gateways
The CONNECT Gateway is designed to adapt and evolve with the needs of research communities. By providing powerful discovery tools, seamless integration options, and archival snapshots, CONNECT transforms vast, complex datasets into actionable insights, tailored to each community’s unique goals.
1. Initialisation: OpenAIRE CONNECT gateways are built on the OpenAIRE Graph, one of the world’s largest collections of open research data. This extensive resource gathers information from over 2,000 trusted providers, including repositories, publishers, research systems, and scholarly services such as Crossref, DOAJ, DOAB, ORCID, DataCite, Software Heritage.
The OpenAIRE Graph goes beyond merely aggregating data, it refines and enriches it using advanced automated processes. Text mining and AI algorithms validate the data, remove duplicates, and extract critical information from OA full-text publications. This includes details such as funding acknowledgments and links to related datasets, ensuring that the data is accurate, interconnected, and actionable for research communities.
For more information on the graph’s construction, click here.
2. Customisation: OpenAIRE CONNECT offers powerful customization options, enabling research communities to create gateways tailored to their specific needs and objectives. From curating content to customizing the interface, CONNECT ensures a gateway that aligns perfectly with your community’s goals. Customization is achieved through the admin tool, which allows curators to set parameters on the following topics:
1. Define Relevance Criteria
Community curators can set detailed relevance criteria using the CONNECT admin tool, including:
- Subject areas and disciplines.
- Keywords relevant to the community’s focus.
- Author affiliations to highlight specific organizations.
- Funding details to prioritize outputs linked to particular grants or sponsors.
Advanced Text Mining Rules
Curators can define new mining rules to refine the discovery of relevant outputs. These rules are integrated into OpenAIRE’s infrastructure workflows, enhancing the identification and enrichment of data aligned with the community’s focus.
Customization of Look and Feel
Communities can personalize the visual identity of their gateway, ensuring it reflects their unique branding and aesthetics. This includes:
- Modifying layouts and themes.
- Customizing logos, colors, and fonts to match organizational branding.
- Creating a user-friendly, visually cohesive interface.
Additional Pages with Community Content
CONNECT supports the addition of customized pages to showcase unique content, such as:
- Open Science policies.
- Guidelines for best practices in Open Science.
- Community news, events, or updates.
These pages allow communities to embed their priorities and values directly into the gateway, creating a resource that serves as more than just a repository.
External Plugin Integration
CONNECT enables the integration of external plugins to extend the functionality of the gateway. Examples include:
- Analytics tools for tracking engagement.
- Visualization plugins for displaying data in innovative ways.
- Additional tools tailored to specific community workflows.
If required, OpenAIRE can collaborate with communities to embed their own plugins, ensuring seamless functionality and a customized experience.
OpenAIRE CONNECT offers extensive customization options to tailor gateways to the specific needs of research communities. Community curators can define relevance criteria for research products, ensuring that only pertinent outputs are included. This customization is achieved through the admin tool, which allows curators to set parameters such as subject areas, keywords, author affiliations, and funding information. By applying these criteria, the system automatically filters the OpenAIRE Graph to present a curated subset of data that aligns with the community's focus. This process ensures that each CONNECT Gateway provides a focused and relevant resource for its community.
Define Relevance Criteria
Community curators can set detailed relevance criteria using the CONNECT admin tool, including:
- Subject areas and disciplines.
- Keywords relevant to the community’s focus.
- Author affiliations to highlight specific organizations.
- Funding details to prioritize outputs linked to particular grants or sponsors.
Advanced Text Mining Rules: Curators can further define new mining rules to refine the discovery of relevant outputs. These rules are integrated into OpenAIRE’s infrastructure workflows, enhancing the identification and enrichment of data aligned with the community’s focus.
Customization of Look and Feel
Communities can personalize the visual identity of their gateway, ensuring it reflects their unique branding and aesthetics. This includes:
- Modifying layouts and themes.
- Customizing logos, colors, and fonts to match organizational branding.
- Creating a user-friendly, visually cohesive interface.
Additional Pages with Community Content
CONNECT supports the addition of customized pages to showcase unique content, such as:
- Open Science policies.
- Guidelines for best practices in Open Science.
- Community news, events, or updates.
These pages allow communities to embed their priorities and values directly into the gateway, creating a resource that serves as more than just a repository.
External Plugin Integration
CONNECT enables the integration of external plugins to extend the functionality of the gateway. Examples include:
- Analytics tools for tracking engagement.
- Visualization plugins for displaying data in innovative ways.
- Additional tools tailored to specific community workflows.
If required, OpenAIRE can collaborate with communities to embed their own plugins, ensuring seamless functionality and a customized experience.
Updates: The OpenAIRE Graph is regularly updated with new research outputs, ensuring that the data remains current. During each update cycle, the criteria set by curators—such as subject focus, keywords, and funding links—are automatically applied. This process filters and selects research products that match the community's specific needs, creating a subset of the graph tailored to that audience.
Access through the portal: The customized selection of research outputs is made available for discovery via the CONNECT Gateway. This gateway provides a user-friendly interface where researchers, institutions, and stakeholders can easily explore the curated content. The tailored view helps users navigate the vast amount of available research and focus on what is most relevant to their interests.
Access via APIs: For communities needing advanced integration, the tailored data subset is accessible through the OpenAIRE API. This allows developers and institutions to integrate the customized data directly into their platforms or systems, enabling seamless use of the research outputs in various workflows and applications.
Published as Metadata Snapshots on Zenodo: Every six months, a metadata snapshot of the tailored view is published on Zenodo. These snapshots:
- Provide a static, citable record of the curated research outputs.
- Allow communities to archive their tailored data sets.
- Support further use by researchers and institutions for analysis, reporting, or integration into other tools.