Repositories for Open Science: the SciRepo reference model

Open Science calls for innovative approaches and solutions embracing the entire research life cycle. From the research publishing perspective, the aim is to pursue an holistic approach where publishing includes any product (e.g. articles, data sets, experiments, notebooks, websites) resulting from a research activity and relevant to the interpretation, evaluation, and reuse of the activity or part of it. In this paper, we present the foundational concepts and relationships characterising SciRepo, i.e. an innovative class of scientific repositories that (a) promotes a publishing mechanism blurring the distinction between research life cycle and its scholarly communication; (b) simplifies the "publishing" of an entire research activity allowing to seamlessly exploit and reuse every research product; and (c) is conceived to be nicely integrated on top of existing research infrastructures.