What is in the EOSC for Arts and Humanities researchers?
EOSC (staying for the European Open Science Cloud) is a big acronym, representing the bold vision of enabling all European researchers to deposit, access and analyze scholarly resources beyond borders and disciplines. Over the past years, it has become a central component of European science policy and, since its launch in October 2018, a reality as an infrastructure too. Still, due to the scale, the complexity and the multiple dimensions of the endeavor, it is not easy to gain an accurate overview and translate the offerings of the EOSC into one’s own institution or research setting. In this series of blog posts, we outline concrete ways in which scholarly and service provider communities around DARIAH can interact with the EOSC and the value it holds for them. We also summarize the many ways in which DARIAH already contributes to the EOSC.
To kick start the series, in the first post we have a look at what the EOSC holds for researchers and, in particular, Arts and Humanities researchers.
Imagine the EOSC as a large map of research data and support services across the EU. As such, it will define what is primarily visible in science on the EU level. Putting Arts and Humanities scholarship on the radar of EOSC and showcasing the richness and value of it is therefore an absolute priority.
Succeeding in this will not only showcase arts and humanities work to scholars from all over Europe and/or other disciplines but also informs funding decisions in the future. Later in this post, we share two concrete ways of how you can do that. On the other hand, the layer of access to research data and services that now constitutes the EOSC, provides a higher baseline to engage into transdisciplinary research. Regarding this latter, you can find inspiration here or here.
Paying a visit to the EOSC Portal will give you an overview of the kinds of resources the EOSC currently offers to help your work. For instance, the non-disciplinary oriented cloud computing services, such as the ones from the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI), allow you to deposit your software in a trusted environment with a quality check, to run virtual machines, or to manage computing workloads in an efficient way. A large portion of these services are Open Access and even if not, it is your institution who faces the charges, not you the individual researcher.
Offerings of the EOSC Portal Catalogue and Marketplace.
Still, since research is primarily organized along disciplines and epistemic traditions, chances are higher that you will more easily find resources that are relevant for your research or research support work in the thematic Social Sciences and Humanities cluster of the EOSC, in SSHOC. Through the SSHOC thematic cloud, you can gain transnational access to data communities as well as quality assured repositories, tools, services and training materials.
The SSH Open Marketplace Browsing and discovering: why contextualisation matters? Within the SSHOC project framework, DARIAH is leading the creation of the SSH Open Marketplace, a discovery portal pulling together tools and services, training materials, publications, workflows and datasets. Thanks to its user-friendly design and to the contextualisation layers added to this registry, you can find resources serendipitously, the same way as browsing through open shelves of big libraries. SSH Open Marketplace – explained the easy way – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tyZ4vhrM9s Building on the research scenarios idea developed in the Standardization Survival Kit (SSK), one of the major assets of the SSH Open Marketplace is the Workflow content type. Workflows include a sequence of steps to describe how to perform a task within the research data lifecycle and linking useful resources to each step. Screenshot of the “Linguistic annotation of corpora” workflow What’s in the Marketplace for you? As a user: browse, and let us know what you think! In its beta version, the SSH Open Marketplace showcases more than 4 500 interlinked resources. Contributions features are not yet implemented but you can already give us your feedback via the contact form or the report an issue function. As a contributor: you will soon be able to enrich existing content or create new resources, thus contributing to the community curation of the portal, and being cited for your contributions. Despite the well-known limits of crowdsourced approaches for tools directories, community-based features are a strong requirement for the Marketplace and will be publicly available within the next months. Check out how you will be able to edit an item via the edit form screenshot below! Screenshot of the SSH Open Marketplace edit form As a moderator: you can join the editorial board as a member to approve, curate and discuss contributions from the community. One mission foreseen for the editorial board is also to engage with research communities to support new content creation (i.e. referencing a new tool or creating a new workflow describing a research use case), based on the gaps identified in the resources. The editorial dashboard that will support such activities is currently under development. |
Besides, let’s not forget that other projects, such as OpenAIRE Advance or TRIPLE, also contribute to bringing Social Sciences and Humanities research and services to the EOSC. Below in the picture you can find discovery platforms that have been developed as key outputs of these projects, namely: 1. The SSH Open Marketplace 2. The GOTRIPLE platform, which will realise Arts and Humanities scholars’ long-awaited request to have a dedicated, domain-specific data and discovery platform at their disposal and 3. The OpenAire Research Graph about which you can read more below.
Thematic discovery platforms developed in the EOSC landscape: the SSH Open Marketplace, the GoTRIPLE portal, the DARIAH OpenAire Community Dashboard
OpenAIRE-DARIAH community gateway The OpenAIRE Research Graph and OpenAIRE Explore, a portal that is built on top of the graph, is probably the biggest such publicly owned, scholarly discovery service in Europe that is inclusive with a wide range of content types. It is expected to become a central service within the EOSC. Through DARIAH’s participation in the OpenAIRE project, we connected thematic data services from the national levels (NAKALA, TextGrid) that are important for the Arts and Humanities communities, to the OpenAIRE Research Graph and we also set up a discovery hub to all kinds of scholarly outputs that are affiliated with DARIAH. Take a test drive! Discovery: In addition to content search, using the gateway, you can also easily find repositories (institutional or thematic) and Zenodo communities for your digital scholarly objects or for more refined discovery. Just go to: https://dariah.openaire.eu/participate/deposit/learn-how Connecting your own research: If you wish to have your own research connected and highlighted in the DARIAH hub (through which it will become part of the generic OpenAIRE knowledge graph), you can easily link your own scholarly records to it. Go to https://dariah.openaire.eu/ and sign in (via ORCID, LinkedIn etc. ) 2. Click on ‘Link’ 3. Add the title or DOI of your publication and check on ‘Search’. 4. Select the publication(s) and click on ‘Link to’. 5. Select ‘Link to communities’ and select DARIAH. 6. Finish linking. |
To conclude, it is worth keeping in mind that the population of the EOSC with thematic services has just recently started. Taking a test drive either in the unified EOSC Portal catalogue or in SSHOC or other ongoing projects gives you the opportunity to have your say and thus contribute to shaping future priorities.
Cover image: Diego Ribero’s map of the world, 1529. Source: Europeana, CC-BY 4.0.
1 Response
[…] the third episode of our EOSC blog series, we discuss what does it mean for DARIAH to contribute to the EOSC federation as a distributed […]