Although research data publishing is today widely regarded as crucial for reproducibility and proper assessment of scientific results, several challenges still need to be solved to fully realize its potential. Developing links between the published literature and datasets is one of them. Current solutions are mostly based on bilateral, ad-hoc agreements between publishers and data centers, operating in silos whose content cannot be readily combined to deliver a network connecting research data and literature. The RDA Data Publishing Services Working Group (DPS-WG) [1] aims to address this issue by bringing together different stakeholders to agree on common standards, combine links from disparate sources, and create a universal, open service for collecting and sharing such links: the Data-Literature Interlinking Service.

The realization and operation of this Service is the result of a synergic effort of the DPS-WG and the OpenAIRE infrastructure. The Service populates and provides access to a graph of dataset-literature links collected from a variety of major data centers, publishers, and research organizations. It offers facilities for the following classes of actors

• - End-users: searching and browsing the graph of links via the DLI Service portal
• - Third-party service developers: accessing publications and datasets in the graph via programmatic APIs (link to API page)
• - Content providers:willing to feed high-quality authoritative links between publications and datasets or between datasets to the Service (link to API page). Note: formal data acquisition policies, SLAs, and data provider registration procedures will be produced at a later stage; currently each “application” is processed independently with bilateral agreements.

Based on feedback from content providers and consumers, DPS-WG will continue to refine the Service data model and exchange format to make it a universal, cross-platform, cross-discipline solution for collecting and sharing dataset-literature links.

References

• [1] RDA Data Publishing Services Working Group Case Statement
• [2] 3TU.Datacentrum
• [3] Australian National Data Service (ANDS)
• [4] Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CCDC)
• [5] CrossRef
• [6] DataCite
• [7] Elsevier
• [8] EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI)
• [9] Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)
• [10] Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
• [11] International Association of STM Publishers
• [12] National Data Service (NDS)
• [13] OpenAIRE
• [14] ORCID
• [15] Protein Data Bank (PDB)
• [16] PANGAEA
• [17] RMap
• [18] Royal Society of Chemistry (RSc)
• [19] Springer