OpenAIRE Graph
Frequently Asked Questions
Using the OpenAIRE Graph
Any and all use of the OpenAIRE Graph should be in line with any applicable EU, international and national laws, including the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, European Convention on Human Rights and its Supplementary Protocols, and the GDPR. Usage should also follow the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity.
When using any data from the OpenAIRE Graph, be sure to comply with its licensing regulations and to give credit where necessary. For more information on licensing, refer to the Licensing section below.
The OpenAIRE Graph is a vast knowledge graph, and assessing its datasets and APIs requires advanced technical understandings. For anyone who would like to take advantage of the Graph’s wealth of knowledge but doesn’t possess such technical skill sets or the time to conduct analysis themselves, OpenAIRE offers a range of services that analyse this data for you and provide you with the information (monitoring reports, publications, etc.) you need in a user-friendly interface.
Browse our service catalogue or contact our Helpdesk to find the best service to fit your needs.
You can access and use the OpenAIRE Graph via several OpenAIRE services. These services navigate the vast knowledge graph for you, so you quickly and easily get the information you need for your projects. Each service provides a specific function, covering your needs in every stage of research. Check some of them out below,
MONITOR: Produces well-documented, timely and accurate monitoring indicators of research activities for funders, research initiatives and organisations, by creating personalised and configurable online dashboards. Understand Open Science value, and measure and evaluate impact, trends, connections, and collaborations all in a centralized platform.
CONNECT: Enables institutions, universities, or lead teams in a scientific domain, to easily create, configure and manage, their own customised web portal that collects and shares research outcomes of their interest to their audiences. The gateways can be public or set in a private mode. Get broader visibility and impact and empower your community.
EXPLORE: Provides access to millions of interlinked scholarly works (publications, data, software), their citations and contextual information such as organisations and grants. Search and view all types of research outcomes, find repositories to deposit your research, and safely claim/link your research. Use one platform for your discovery needs, you can even build a customised search portal.
PROVIDE: Receives content registration requests and provides guidance for content providers by viewing a personalised, user-friendly dashboard that shows the necessary steps and status of the services to complete the process. Through this gateway, you can verify compliance & repository readiness for all types of Open Access articles and integrate scholarly content entity information into the OpenAIRE and EOSC ecosystem.
Open Science Observatory: Facilitates access to the Open Science indicators for policymakers, funders, and organisations, by combining and visualising information from all over Europe. Providing a complete picture of a country's research outputs and Open Science uptake, the Open Science Observatory is vital for informed decision-making.
These services have been meticulously constructed by Open Science experts to address all actors within the research community. Check out the entire OpenAIRE Service Catalogue to see how you can use them to harness the power of the research innovative ecosystem.
The OpenAIRE Graph APIs can be accessed through authenticated and non-authenticated requests. We suggest making authenticated request as the request limit per hour is significantly higher, you can refer to the documentation page here to see the updated request limits.
There are two main modes that you can use to authenticate API requests:
- Personal access tokens, which are intended for individuals
- Registered services, which are appropriate for production-ready services to consume data from the Graph
You can find more details on how to register to the OpenAIRE Graph APIs for both modes here.
To make a non-authenticated request, nothing else is needed apart from knowing the API endpoint that is appropriate for the request you have in mind. Find out more here.
Like other similar services, the OpenAIRE Graph API has a request limit to protect the system from receiving more requests than it can handle, and to ensure an equitable distribution of the system resources.
These limits also help to prevent malicious attacks (e.g., DoS attacks) that can overwhelm the underlying system or other infrastructures with too many requests.
You can download the full OpenAIRE Graph dataset, sub-graph datasets, and other related datasets along with their schemas in Zenodo. Access the Graph documentation for all resources related to downloading these materials, including how to cite them. It should however be noted that these files are of substantial size and therefore not easy to load on a local machine.
If you would like to download some parts locally, access our Beginner's Kit which can also help to familiarise yourself with the underlying data model and explore its contents. This dataset includes a subset of the Graph, which is easier to handle in a local machine (e.g., a laptop), and a notebook with indicative queries for demonstration purposes.
Contributing to the OpenAIRE Graph
There are many ways you can contribute to the OpenAIRE Graph.
The most direct way is by uploading your outputs into Zenodo, the catch-all repository that feeds its data to the OpenAIRE Graph. Read our quick step-by-step guide on how to upload your work to Zenodo and increase your impact.
If you would like to set up Zenodo as your institution’s primary repository, contact us.
The OpenAIRE Graph also gathers data from other Open Access repositories and journals. By ensuring that your work is Open Access, you contribute to the Graph and help broaden and enrich the Open Science landscape.
You can also contribute to the OpenAIRE Graph through our services. OpenAIRE offers a variety of services for all actors in the research ecosystem to address needs in every stage of research. For some of these services, such as PROVIDE and MONITOR, you provide data which then gets incorporated into the Graph and helps to establish more links, allowing for a more comprehensive view of the Open Science landscape. Check out our service catalogue and see how you can ameliorate your impact, discovery, and projects while contributing to the Graph.
For more details on how you can use or contribute to the OpenAIRE Graph, go to our Use / Contribute page.
The OpenAIRE Graph dataset is updated every 6 months. Your data will be visible in the Graph from the next update following the date you uploaded your data.
While the main dataset is updated every 6 months, the Graph is continuously under development, releasing a new API version every 1-2 months, where we improve and expand the reach of algorithms, incorporate new datasets, and more, all to ensure data quality.
If you would like to see the major developments of all past dataset and API updates, consult the changelog.
To register your funding data to OpenAIRE, and thereby the OpenAIRE Graph, a limited metadata set is required. Use the contact form on this page to discuss with our team the best way for you and your projects to submit this set. Once this is acquired, your data will be analysed over a 2-week period, after which, it will move to Beta and then Production where it will be available in the OpenAIRE Graph.
For more details, check out our How to Join OpenAIRE guide for funders.
Once published, the best way to view your data is via OpenAIRE MONITOR. This is an OpenAIRE service that produces well-documented, timely and accurate monitoring indicators of your research activities via a personalised dashboard. MONITOR is instrumental in helping you to measure research impact and discover trends, connections, and collaborations to improve and optimize your future actions.
Learn more about MONITOR.
The OpenAIRE Graph is constantly under development. Our teams work every day to expand the reach of our algorithms, incorporate new datasets, and enhance data quality overall. We strive for transparency and therefore are always open to discuss operations, developments, and how we can better the service for you and your needs.
To reach out, you can simply contact us via the Helpdesk, which not only serves as a channel for questions and service implementation, but also as a way to contact our teams for suggestions and feedback.
You can also join us in our Community Calls held on the third Wednesday of each month. These are open to all and provide the context for our team can present how the Graph is made, new developments, and case uses followed by an open discussion with the community. Here you are given the opportunity to pose questions and give any feedback or suggestions.
Go to the Community Call page now and register for the next session, we want to hear from you!
Licensing
The OpenAIRE Graph is freely available for download and re-use under CC-BY licensing. This is because some of the inputs in the Graph are licensed under this category. Some input sources of the Graph (e.g., OpenCitations) provide their data using CC0, hence these respective Graph contents (e.g., citations coming from OpenCitations) can be downloaded from the original sources with this license.
Please examine the licensing of the Graph sources to investigate this option.
The OpenAIRE Graph is available for use under CC-BY licensing. This is because some of the inputs in the Graph are licensed under this category. Using a CC-BY licensed dataset or API means that you must give credit to the source, state if any changes have been made, and not insinuate that you or your use of these datasets and API has been endorsed by the OpenAIRE Graph. You must also provide a link to the license.
See how to cite and acknowledge your use of the Graph.
Learn more about CC-BY licensing here.
Some datasets within the Graph, such as those from OpenCitations, are licensed under CC0. This means that you can use these inputs however you like (modify, use for commercial purposes, etc.) without the obligation to give credit.
Learn more about CC0 licensing here.
Under the Hood
First and foremost, the OpenAIRE Graph is a free and open resource backed by the European Commission and serves as the authoritative source for the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). We do not take this role lightly and work every day to better the Graph and our services to meet the expectations of this position that our team has been entrusted with.
We highly value transparency and take the necessary extra steps to make sure you always know what’s going on in the OpenAIRE Graph, both in its implementation, and under the hood. Information on how the Graph is made, how to access it, and its functions can be easily accessed in our documentation. We also hold Community Calls on the third Wednesday of each month. These calls provide the context for our team to engage in open discussion with you, the community, on how the Graph is made, new developments, and case uses. Questions, suggestions, or feedback, the floor is yours! You can also stay up to date with developments in the Graph by following our Twitter.
The OpenAIRE Graph also hosts various types of data such as publications, datasets, software, other research products providing you with all types of research outcomes to help you in your projects and more Open Data for evaluation.
Rather than aggregating this data and directly disseminating it, the OpenAIRE Graph goes further and works to enhance data quality through deduplication and enrichment. Many graphs do the former which results in false figures such as the number of funders, publications, etc. setting the field for inaccurate monitoring and reporting. Through the deduplication process, we work to remove doubles or multiples of the same data. The data is then enriched, establishing links between elements to show not only relationships between themselves, but also to research organisations, researchers, funders, and other related entities, resulting in an enriched and comprehensive view of the Open Science research landscape.
To access this view, users can download the Graph dataset, access its API, or use one of OpenAIRE’s value-added services. The OpenAIRE dataset is extremely vast and requires a deep level of technical understanding to analyse. This knowledge barrier poses a problem for those that don’t possess the necessary skill sets and wish to take advantage of its wealth of information. To bridge this gap, OpenAIRE provides services that help you with accessing and analysing data in a user-friendly interface. For example, you can search for and access all research products, projects, data sources, and organisations in the Graph via EXPLORE, track and monitor your research projects with MONITOR, and provide a gateway to facilitate knowledge sharing within your community with CONNECT. Consult the service catalogue to see how you can use the Graph to advance your projects.
The OpenAIRE Graph is the epitome of a community-driven effort and technological advancement. With its infrastructure and services, we not only seek to make knowledge accessible to all, but strive to foster collaboration in the scientific community, all while aligning with and aiding the development of the Open Science landscape.
The OpenAIRE has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreements No. 777541 and 101017452 to support the establishment and development of the OpenAIRE Graph.
The OpenAIRE Graph is also the authoritative source for the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) an initiative from the European Commission to provide an environment where not only members of the research community, but citizens and innovators can publish, find and reuse data, and discover tools and services for research, innovation, and education.
The OpenAIRE Graph is continuously under development, releasing a new API version every 1-2 months where we improve and expand the reach of algorithms, incorporate new datasets, and more, all to ensure data quality.
The OpenAIRE Graph dataset is updated every 6 months. In these updates, all data that has been submitted to the Graph is aggregated and undergoes an in-depth enrichment and deduplication process. These added steps of cleaning and enriching the data, allow for a knowledge graph that not only includes a comprehensive dataset but also improves the overall data quality.