The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has been awarded a joint $1.2 million grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to expand and enhance SHARE's open data set of research and scholarly activities across their life cycle. SHARE is an initiative of the Association of Research Libraries carried out in collaboration with the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), and the Center for Open Science (COS).
SHARE is an open source project to maximize research impact by making a comprehensive inventory of research widely accessible, discoverable, and reusable. The initiative is accomplishing its mission by collecting data that describes and links to research outputs from many digital sources, and by providing a feed, a search box, and a common application programming interface (API) for people to access the research in real time. SHARE includes data about research grant awards, publications, reports, data sets, data management plans, software code, and more.
In a print-based publishing system, information about research activity is largely restricted to publications in journals and books, which are late-stage expressions of research. On the web, nearly every step of the scholarly research process is now born-digital, documenting incremental research activity. SHARE facilitates access to such research activity as it happens.
SHARE Notify, funded by IMLS and Sloan and developed over the past year and a half, already provides this timely data stream from nearly 60 sources and supplies links to more than two million outputs from researchers around the globe. The SHARE Notify architecture is built on COS's Open Science Framework, a free, open source, web platform designed to support researchers' entire work flow from project planning, organisation, and execution to archiving and sharing.
There are two primary elements of SHARE's Phase II, which will run through early 2017. First, the project team will conduct investigations with several research universities about the value and challenges of tracking and reporting their research activities. At the same time, the team will increase the quantity of sources coming into the SHARE data set, and add or impute missing elements (e.g., author identifier, institution, funding agency) to improve the quality of the data set.
Many people and organisations benefit from a timely, connected data set of research events—including universities, researchers, funding agencies, libraries, repositories, publishers, and the public. Making the data set open for reuse means that anyone can use it to address a multitude of needs, from tracking the outputs of particular projects to sharing research more widely to innovating and collaborating.
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