The FAIR “Research Object” paradigm for realizing Open Science with the RELIANCE EOSC project

The field of Open Science has made scientists agree on the idea that data, workflows and services should be findable, accessible, interoperable, and thus optimally reusable (FAIR). These principles apply to Earth Science communities also, dealing with rapidly evolving natural phenomena. However, there is still a weakness regarding research sharing and re-use through the scientific community, due to lack of technological solutions and their long-term implementation. The H2020 Reliance project (https://www.reliance-project.eu) delivers a suite of innovative and interconnected services that extend European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) capabilities to support the management of the research lifecycle within Earth Science communities, Copernicus users, and beyond. The project has delivered three complementary technologies: Research Object, Data Cubes and AI-based Text Mining. ROHub (https://reliance.rohub.org/) is the Research Object management platform that implements these three technologies and enables researchers to collaboratively manage, share and preserve their research work. ROHub implements the full Research Object model and paradigm: resources associated to a particular research work are aggregated into a single FAIR digital object, and metadata relevant for understanding and interpreting the content is represented as semantic metadata that are user and machine readable. 

Research Objects are the innovative and interoperable service, open-by-default, and cross-disciplinary research management environment. Research Objects are virtual aggregations of resources that bring together data, methods, results and people to document scientific investigations, according to Open Science principles. To guide researchers, different types of Research Objects can be created: Basic, that can contain anything; Bibliography-centric, including manuals, and/or other material that support research; Data-centric, focused on datasets which can be indexed, discovered, and manipulated; Executable, including code, data and computational environment. This type of Research Objects can be executed and is often used for scripts and/or Jupyter Notebooks. Research Objects can be public/open/private and can be snapshotted or archived with permanent identifier (DOI). Additional information is associated and displayed in ROHub such as number of downloads, additional discovered metadata (automatically generated from the Reliance Text Mining service), keywords and citation. The toolbox and share tools in ROHub allow end-users to download, snapshot and archive the Research Object and/or share it. Any Research Object in ROHub is a FAIR digital object that is for instance findable in OpenAire, including those without DOI associated.

The development of ROHub is co-designed and validated through multidisciplinary and thematic real life use cases led by three different Earth Science communities: Geohazards, Sea Monitoring and Climate Change communities. In our presentation, we will showcase different types of Research Objects for the three Earth Science communities represented in Reliance to highlight how the scientists in our respective disciplines fostered their work towards Open Science.

The RELIANCE (Research lifecycle management for Earth Science Communities and Copernicus users in EOSC) project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 INFRAEOSC programme under grant agreement No 101017501.