A new Metadata Application Profile for Literature Repositories is approaching

The OpenAIRE and formerly DRIVER-Guidelines for Content Providers have been providing orientation for repository managers to align local and regional metadata management policies for the purpose of a pan-European Open Access network realized by the OpenAIRE infrastructure. The guiding principle has been always to reuse widely established standards, such as Dublin Core, in combination with a set of controlled vocabularies, such as info:eu-repo.

The scholarly record is evolving which affects how and what bibliographic metadata describe. Examples to this respect are references to funder and project grants, citation and relation of so called non-traditional research output, credit for and unique identification of authors and contributors; differentiation of access rights, license re-use information on the file level and resource types.

The repository community is requested to keep pace with these developments. OpenAIRE is preparing an application profile for literature repository content providers which is a major update of the current OpenAIRE Guidelines v3.0. It re-uses elements from the Dublin Core and DataCite metadata schema complemented by specific elements and attributes not covered sufficiently by these schemes.

The OpenAIRE Guidelines version 4.0 address the following challenges:

• The capability to describe the scholarly record by help of more granular, precise and normalized metadata for the benefit of modern, sophisticated, value added services;
• To support the interlinking of scholarly works to support the contextualization of research output;
• To move forward the application of controlled vocabularies and thesauri supporting web-actionable URIs;
• To ease the discovery of open access fulltext files;
• To make a distinction between access rights and license re-use conditions;
• To improve the formal validation of metadata records by an underlying metadata schema;
• To support global metadata alignment with other scholarly communication infrastructures

The new Application Profile (OpenAIRE Guidelines 4.0) will be released for consultation in November-2017. The OpenAIRE guidelines team ir organizing a webinar to detail the new guidelines - November 14, 11h00 CET. Stay tuned.