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Interoperability Framework for Exchanging Information.

Learn more about the links between scholarly literature and data.
Overview

ScholeXplorer is OpenAIRE's Scholix hub.

ScholeXplorer populates and provides access to a graph of links between dataset-literature objects and dataset-dataset objects. Links (and objects) are provided by data sources managed by publishers, data centres, or other organisations providing services to store and manage links between data sets and publications.

How does ScholeXplorer work?

1. Data Source Registration

Data sources, like repositories containing research articles or datasets need to be registered with OpenAIRE, a European Open Science infrastructure.

2. Data Harvesting

OpenAIRE harvests data from registered sources. This data might include scholarly articles with links to datasets or datasets themselves.

3. Scholarly Link Identification

ScholeXplorer then scans the harvested data from OpenAIRE (and potentially other registered sources) to identify links between scholarly articles and datasets.

4. Metadata Resolution

Once a link is identified, ScholeXplorer tries to gather detailed information (metadata) about the linked data (datasets). This metadata might include information about the author, title, publication date, etc.

5. Open Access

The collected information about links and resolved metadata is then made freely available through ScholeXplorer's search APIs. Researchers can utilise these APIs to find relevant datasets referenced in their field of study.

The process in 3 steps!

01

Expose Scholix data

ScholeXplorer harvests scholarly links from OpenAIRE-compatible data sources, attempting to resolve metadata regarding related PIDs.

Data sources that want their published or provided links to be included in ScholeXplorer must be registered as a valid OpenAIRE repository.

02

Access Scholix data from this hub

The Scholix Swagger API allows clients to run REST queries over the ScholeXplorer index in order to fetch links matching given criteria. In the current version, users can search for:

  • Links whose source object has a given PID or PID type;
  • Links whose source object has been published by a given data source ("data source as publisher");
  • Links that were collected from a given data source ("data source as provider").

The latest API is available from here.

The results of queries return lists of links encoded as JSON Scholix records. JSON (and XML) schema and example records for Scholix links are available on GitHub.

03

Terms of Use and SLA

REST APIs: ScholeXplorer's REST APIs are free-to-use (no sign-up needed) by any third-party service.
Please note that:

  • The service limits each query to around 10,000 paged results (pages are by default 100 results in length and can be navigated via resumption token)
  • Since March 2018 a full JSON dump of the service is made available in Zenodo.org every six months
  • For unlimited access to the APIs please contact the service administrators

Metadata license is CC-BY: Scholix metadata records returned by the service can be freely re-used by commercial and non-commercial partners under CC-BY license, as long as OpenAIRE ScholeXplorer is acknowledged as a content provider.

SLA: The service is running in production 24/7 within the OpenAIRE infrastructure premises deployed at the data centre facilities of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling (ICM).

References

Publication
Burton A., Koers H., Manghi P., La Bruzzo S., Aryani A., Diepenbroek M., & Schindler U. (2015). On Bridging Data Centers and Publishers: The Data-Literature Interlinking Service. Springer International Publishing https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24129-6_28
Publication
Mokrane, M., Burton, A., Koers, H., & Stocker, M. (2016). Persistent Identifiers: a Prerequisite to Establish the Framework for Scholarly Link Exchange—Scholix. Available on Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.252389
Publication
Burton, A., Koers, H., Manghi, P., La Bruzzo, S., Aryani, A., Diepenbroek, M., & Schindler, U. (2020). The Data-Literature Interlinking Service. Available on Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3776086
Publication
Burton, A., Aryani, A., Koers, H., Manghi, P., La Bruzzo, S., Stocker, M., … Fenner, M. (2017). The Scholix Framework for Interoperability in Data-Literature Information Exchange. D-Lib Magazine, 23. Download link https://doi.org/10.1045/january2017-burton
Deliverable
Burton, A., Fenner, M., Haak, W., & Manghi, P. (2017). Scholix Metadata Schema for Exchange of Scholarly Communication Links (Version v3). Available on Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1120265