The SciLake project team recently presented at the OpenAIRE Connect Community Call, showcasing the Energy Pilot's work on configuring OpenAIRE gateways. This blog post summarizes key insights from Thanasis Vergoulis and Andrea Salmi's presentation on how domain experts can leverage OpenAIRE Connect to define relevant subgraphs for their research communities.

July 31, 2025  

SciLake and OpenAIRE: Building Custom Gateways for Research Communities

Thanasis Vergoulis (ARC) opened the presentation by introducing the SciLake project and explaining how OpenAIRE Connect enables domain experts to identify which parts of the OpenAIRE graph are most relevant to their specific research domains. The platform allows researchers to define and extract subgraphs that are particularly interesting or useful to their communities.

The SciLake Energy Pilot: An Iterative Configuration Approach

Andrea Salmi (HES-SO) presented the Energy Pilot's experience with configuring OpenAIRE gateways. The team adopted an iterative approach to refine their gateway configuration, testing how different criteria affected their results.

• Initial approach: Connected publications with specific projects (e.g. ENERMAPS), yielding only a few thousand results.
• Expansion phase: Added journals and selected specific journal subjects and communities, which significantly increased results to several million.
• Refinement challenge: An attempt to use advanced criteria unintentionally increased results further due to overlapping subjects.
• Successful narrowing: Removed redundant subjects and added more context in advanced criteria, helping to focus results.
• Final optimization: Implemented intensive configurations using approximately 100 carefully selected keywords for power/energy topics to achieve more precise results.

Key Findings and Recommendations

Based on their experience, the Energy Pilot team offered several valuable insights:

• Accept some noise: It's practically impossible to create a perfectly defined gateway with zero noise. The goal should be to reduce noise as much as possible while maintaining useful coverage.
• Purpose-driven configuration: Gateway configuration should align with intended use cases—whether that requires higher precision or broader coverage, particularly for transdisciplinary research.
• Technical improvements: Several suggestions were made to enhance the OpenAIRE Connect platform:
  • Streamline the process for configuring advanced criteria, possibly with table-based inputs or batch operations
  • Provide direct feedback on how different choices impact gateway results
  • Improve journal inputs, as many selected journals had minimal outputs
  • Enhance data source integration, as certain sources introduced noise while others offered minimal metadata
  • Clarify how the relevance algorithm works to help users understand result ordering
  • Implement notification systems to notify gateway managers about updates

The Energy Pilot's experience demonstrates that configuring OpenAIRE gateways is an iterative process that requires careful balancing of breadth and specificity. By sharing these insights, the SciLake team hopes to help other research communities more effectively leverage OpenAIRE Connect to create tailored research environments.

In a significant stride towards enhancing scholarly knowledge interoperability, OpenAIRE has released datasets compliant with the Scientific Knowledge Graph Interoperability Framework (SKG-IF) for all five SciLake pilot domains. These datasets represent a crucial development in making research information more accessible and interoperable across different communities. This blog post explores these new resources and their importance for advancing scholarly communication.

July 30, 2025

What's New

OpenAIRE has created specialized datasets in the Scientific Knowledge Graph Interoperability Framework (SKG-IF) format, tailored specifically for the SciLake project pilots. This work, coordinated by Miriam Baglioni (CNR), represents a significant advancement in making scholarly knowledge more accessible and interoperable across research communities.

Each dataset contains relevant scholarly information from the OpenAIRE Graph and follows the SKG-IF core model structure, which comprises six fundamental entities:

• Research product: Includes research literature, data, software, or other scholarly outputs
• Agent: Represents individuals, organizations, or entities involved in creating or publishing research
• Data source: Services or platforms where research products are stored and made accessible
• Venue: Publishing gateways used to make research available
• Grant: Funding awarded to agents by funding bodies
• Topic: Scientific disciplines, subjects, and keywords relevant to research products

This development represents an important achievement for the SciLake project, enabling more efficient data integration and knowledge discovery across different research domains.

Access the Datasets

The SciLake SKG-IF compliant datasets are now available on Zenodo:

• Cancer research pilot: https://zenodo.org/records/15781620
• Energy planning pilot: https://zenodo.org/records/15855143
• Neuroscience pilot: https://zenodo.org/records/15856315
• Transport (CCAM) pilot: https://zenodo.org/records/15856727
• Transport (Maritime) pilot: https://zenodo.org/records/15856795

About SKG-IF

With these new specialized datasets, SKG-IF continues to gain momentum in the scholarly knowledge graph community, providing SciLake pilots with interoperable data resources while encouraging wider adoption of this promising framework.

The Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS) Regional Meeting 2025, held from June 16-19 in Oslo, Norway, brought together researchers, clinicians, and students from across the neuroscience community. The conference covered a broad spectrum of topics, from fundamental research to clinical applications, with special focus on the integration of artificial intelligence and computational models in neuroscience research.

Jun 25, 2025

SciLake Representation

Archana Golla from the University of Oslo represented the SciLake project, presenting a poster on our innovative Scientific Knowledge Graph (SKG) developed specifically for neuroscience research.

The poster titled "A Novel SKG to Integrate Public Metadata and Analyse Trends in Neuroscience Research" showcased SciLake's work in addressing the challenges of organizing and analyzing the growing volume of heterogeneous neuroscience research outputs.

Technical Innovation

Our neuroscience pilot has established a novel SKG by integrating:

• Scholarly metadata automatically harvested from journal publications in the OpenAIRE Graph
• openMINDS metadata from EBRAINS datasets mapped to the OpenAIRE metadata schema

Key Features of the SciLake Neuroscience SKG

The SKG offers several advanced capabilities:

• Implementation in AvantGraph to facilitate advanced citation analyses
• Integration of SIRIS entity recognition tools to establish connections between datasets and publications
• Programmatic access and user-friendly interface highlighting linked datasets and publications
• Comprehensive citation metrics to track research impact

Impact and Applications

The neuroscience SKG provides researchers and service providers with a powerful tool for:

• Exploring research uptake and impact
• Identifying emerging trends in neuroscience research
• Optimizing research and data sharing efforts
• Improving the visibility and accessibility of valuable datasets

Stay in touch

Following the positive reception at FENS 2025, the SciLake team will continue refining the SKG and expanding its capabilities. We invite researchers interested in exploring or contributing to this innovative tool to contact us through the project website: https://scilake.eu/neuroscience-case-study

At the INORMS Congress 2025 in Madrid, SciLake partners from OpenAIRE showcased and promoted open and federated infrastructures as essential tools for transparent, inclusive, and sustainable research assessment. The event provided an excellent opportunity to engage with the global research management community and expand Open Science practices among research managers and administrators.

Jun 6, 2025

SciLake partners from OpenAIRE recently presented their work on open and federated infrastructures at the INORMS Congress 2025 in Madrid. The presentation, titled "A Scientific Lake to Democratise Knowledge: The OpenAIRE Graph and SciLake's Ecosystem" was delivered by Giulia Malaguarnera from OpenAIRE, in collaboration with Stefania Amodeo (OpenAIRE) and Thanasis Vergoulis (Athena RC).

At the heart of SciLake's innovation is its "Scientific Lake" concept: a comprehensive ecosystem of customizable components that enables researchers to create, interlink, and maintain domain-specific Scientific Knowledge Graphs (SKGs). This ecosystem significantly enhances research capabilities by providing seamless access to scientific data and offering discipline-specific services.

The project builds upon the OpenAIRE Graph, a global SKG containing over 250M research outputs from more than 130,000 sources. This extensive database links publications, data, and software with their funding sources and creators, while tracking their impact.

The presentation showcased the SciLake ecosystem of components, demonstrating how our innovative approach combines the power of the OpenAIRE Graph with domain-specific knowledge to create a versatile and user-friendly system that is used by researchers across diverse fields.

How Does SciLake Empower Research Management?

For research administrators, SciLake offers practical benefits by streamlining workflows through centralized data access and automated analysis tools. The SciLake toolkit ensures transparent evaluation processes and provides constant data updates, significantly reducing manual effort in report generation.