On bridging data centers and publishers: the data-literature interlinking service

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 data sets 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 Publishing Data Services Working Group (PDS-WG) 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. This paper presents the synergic effort of the PDS-WG and the OpenAIRE infrastructure to realize and operate such a service. 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. At the time of writing, the Service has close to one million links with further contributions expected. Based on feedback from content providers and consumers, PDS-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.