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This article describes how virtual research environments (VREs) offer new opportunities for researchers to analyse open data and to obtain new insights for policy making. Although various VRE-related initiatives are under development, there is a lack of insight into how VREs support collaborative open data analysis by researchers and how this might be improved, ultimately leading to input for policy making to solve societal issues. This article clarifies in which ways VREs support researchers in open data analysis. Seven cases presenting different modes of researcher support for open data analysis were investigated and compared. Four types of support were identified: 1) ‘Figure it out yourself', 2) ‘Leading users by the hand', 3) ‘Training to provide the basics' and 4) ‘Learning from peers'. The author provides recommendations to improve the support of researchers' open data analysis and to subsequently obtain new insights for policy making to solve societal challenges.

Despite the hype, the effective implementation of Open Science is hindered by several cultural and technical barriers. Researchers embraced digital science, use “digital laboratories” (e.g. research infrastructures, thematic services) to conduct their research and publish research data, but practices and tools are still far from achieving the expectations of transparency and reproducibility of Open Science. The places where science is performed and the places where science is published are still regarded as different realms. Publishing is still a post-experimental, tedious, manual process, too often limited to articles, in some contexts semantically linked to datasets, rarely to software, generally disregarding digital representations of experiments. In this work we present the OpenAIRE Research Community Dashboard (RCD), designed to overcome some of these barriers for a given research community, minimizing the technical efforts and without renouncing any of the community services or practices. The RCD flanks digital laboratories of research communities with scholarly communication tools for discovering and publishing interlinked scientific products such as literature, datasets, and software. The benefits of the RCD are show-cased by means of two real-case scenarios: the European Marine Science community and the European Plate Observing System (EPOS) research infrastructure. This work is partly funded by the OpenAIRE-Advance H2020 project (grant number: 777541; call: H2020-EINFRA-2017) and the OpenAIREConnect H2020 project (grant number: 731011; call: H2020-EINFRA-2016-1). Moreover, we would like to thank our colleagues Michele Manunta, Francesco Casu, and Claudio De Luca (Institute for the Electromagnetic Sensing of the Environment, CNR, Italy) for their work on the EPOS infrastructure RCD; and Stephane Pesant (University of Bremen, Germany) his work on the European Marine Science RCD. First Online 30 August 2019

This book is a collection of seventeen papers which describe the impact that the ARIADNE project and its successor, ARIADNEplus (2019-2022) have had on the archaeological community, both in Europe and further afield. Each case study has been contributed by organisations involved in the ARIADNE Infrastructure who cover many countries from across Europe as well as Argentina and Japan. These papers were originally presented at the CAA Conference in Krakow, April 2019 and cover aspects such as data management, application of standards and guidelines, the use of CIDOC-CRM and Open Data to name but a few.

In 2018, the European Strategic Forum for research infrastructures (ESFRI) was tasked by the Competitiveness Council, a configuration of the Council of the EU, to develop a common approach for monitoring of Research Infrastructures' performance. To this end, ESFRI established a working group, which has proposed 21 Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to monitor the progress of the Research Infrastructures (RIs) addressed towards their objectives. The RIs were then asked to assess their relevance for their institution. The paper aims to identify the relevance of certain indicators for particular groups of RIs by using cluster and discriminant analysis. This could contribute to development of a monitoring system, tailored to particular RIs. To obtain a typology of the RIs, we first performed cluster analysis of the RIs according to their properties, which revealed clusters of RIs with similar characteristics, based on to the domain of operation, such as food, environment or engineering. Then, discriminant analysis was used to study how the relevance of the KPIs differs among the obtained clusters. This analysis revealed that the percentage of RIs correctly classified into five clusters, using the KPIs, is 80%. Such a high percentage indicates that there are significant differences in the relevance of certain indicators, depending on the ESFRI domain of the RI. The indicators therefore need to be adapted to the type of infrastructure. It is therefore proposed that the Strategic Working Groups of ESFRI addressing specific domains should be involved in the tailored development of the monitoring of pan-European RIs. 15 pages, 8 tables, 3 figures

The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) portal website aims to aggregate digitally available archival descriptions concerning the Holocaust. This portal is actually a meta-catalogue, or an information aggregator, whose biggest goal is to have up-to-date information by means of building sustainable data pipelines between EHRI and its content providers. Just like in similar archival information aggregators (e.g. Archives Portal Europe or Monasterium), the XML-based metadata standard Encoded Archival Description (EAD) plays a key role. The article presents how EADs are imported into the portal, mainly thanks to the Open Archive Initiative protocols.

One of the challenges encountered by the EOSCpilot project was to gather structured feedback from a wide variety of potential stakeholder about the ‘moving target’ that is the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). EOSC was at its early stage of construction, pilot proof of concept of services were constructed at the same time stakeholder mapping was performed and Governance was being designed by the project (and by the European Commission in parallel, providing a roadmap of EOSC present and future projects). This interaction of projects and initiatives was designed to conduct a fast-paced implementation of the EOSC, combining a top-down and bottom-up approach, where results from piloting the proof-of-concept provide input into the overall design. In this context, this Report on Governance Piloting Process describes the methodology used for a structured bottom-up approach of EOSCpilot Work Package 2, and how it was used by the different tasks (Stakeholder mapping, Governance framework design, Rules of participation, Business model), contributing to the Governance Development Forum. In addition to traditional tools such as surveys, webinars, workshops and conferences, a specific tool with an interactive platform was used to gather audience feedback.

International audience; CIDOC CRM is an ontology intended to facilitate the integration, mediation and interchange of heterogeneous cultural heritage information. The Semantic Web with its Linked Open Data cloud enables scholars and cultural institutions to publish their data in RDF, using CIDOC CRM as an interlingua that enables a semantically consistent re-interpretation of their data. Nowadays more and more projects have done the task of mapping legacy datasets to CIDOC CRM, and successful Extract-Transform-Load data-integration processes have been performed in this way. A next step is enabling people and applications to actually dynamically explore autonomous datasets using the semantic mediation offered by CIDOC CRM. This is the purpose of OpenArchaeo, a tool for querying archaeological datasets on the LOD cloud. We present its main features: the principles behind its user friendly query interface and its SPARQL Endpoint for programs, together with its overall architecture designed to be extendable and scalable, for handling transparent interconnections with evolving distributed sources while achieving good efficiency.