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.
- Personalize Your Gateway: Customize your menu, edit pages, and align your visual identity with custom logos, banners, backgrounds, buttons, and colors. Managers on the Advanced and Premium plans can also request additional pages.
- Custom Home Page: Add your personalized content, statistics, documentation, and best practices to the home page.
- Set Inclusion Criteria: Define which research products to include.
Content in your gateway is automatically updated approximately once a month, every time the OpenAIRE Graph is refreshed - one of the largest, most accurate, and highly interconnected Scholarly Knowledge Graphs
Collaborate to curate and customize your gateway, with no limit on the number of managers.
Find research records in your community easily with simple and advanced search options. Use filters like Fields of Science and UN Sustainable Development Goals to narrow down your search.
Is your community organized by themes or countries? With the Advanced plan, you can browse through different sub-communities.
Want to see research products by organization? This new feature will be available soon with the Premium plan!
Discover how your research community contributes to various disciplines and advances the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Your community's publications are automatically categorized by SciNoBo, a system developed by an OpenAIRE member, that organizes research into specific scientific fields and aligns it with the SDGs. Learn more at OpenAIRE SDGs and FOS.
- Add Research Products: Allow users to contribute their research products to the gateway, enriching the community's research records.
- Create Links: Users can link research products to one another and to project grants. See the guide.
- Claim Authorship: Researchers can claim their work by linking it to their ORCID ID. Learn more.
OpenAIRE uses advanced text mining algorithms to enrich your community's scholarly record, linking publications to funding projects, affiliations, research data, software, patents, and more. Learn more.
Looking for more? With an Advanced or Premium plan, you can access a customized text mining solution to enhance your gateway’s coverage or further enrich your community's research records. Examples include:
- Analyzing acknowledgements in publications to identify references to research infrastructure.
- Analyzing full-text Open Access publications to uncover mentions of facilities, instruments, devices, or datasets.
Monitor the adoption of Open Science practices in your community through clear, easy-to-read charts. Track data on Open Access publications, datasets, geographic distribution, datasets with persistent identifiers, download counts by year, and changes in access rights over time.
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.