Open Scholarly Metadata for Sharing the Nuances of Research Processes

Open Scholarly Metadata for Sharing the Nuances of Research Processes Consider what can be inferred about this vulture’s travels by way of its wing tags and transponder. Photo:MinoZig,CC0. Untapped potential to find and be found Research is a dynamic journey through a complex, evolving network of decisions and activities. Each journey is unique, featuring crucial and often meticulously documented details. These nuances are rarely captured in structured formats or shared beyond those directly involved. The more facets of research processes are shared, the more possibilities there are to engage with the process and the associated people and workflows. Capturing and sharing structured metadata about research processes can enhance these possibilities further. Different research processes or their elements can thus be assessed in terms of characteristics like similarity or complementarity, then grouped and analyzed within and across groups. This provides opportunities for shared learning and supports diverse modes of collaboration as well as for matchmaking between researchers, research resources and research activities. References FAIR Jupyter | Biomedical Open Source Software: Crucial Packages and Hidden Heroes | Standardising the representation of Digital Use Conditions | Mining the literature for ethics statements | Introducing Hypothesis Descriptions Daniel Mietchen, FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructures Open and granularsharing of <structured metadata> about research processes enhances reproducibility, reuse,teaching,scalability, community engagement and diversityof impacts. This poster is a contribution to the Workshop on Open Citations 2025 and available under CC0 1.0 via https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15512071. The underlying work is supported by the DFG grants 556323977,460135501 and 521476232 for the SeDOA,MaRDI and KGI4NFDI projects. Examples Imagine what kinds of research and teaching become possible when the orange parts are shared. Software usage •regularly described in terms of fields available in common metadata frameworks –title, author, license, programming language, operating system, source code URL, documentation URL, version, release data, direct software dependencies (and their version), identifiers •rarely described in terms of structured metadata –processes/ governance pertaining to software –file types for import, processing, export –complex dependencies *algorithms, data, hardware, permissions *upstream / downstream; transitive / reverse *user communities, workflows and benchmarks –resource use (min/ max/ average) *RAM/ CPU/ cores/ storage/ network *environmental footprint (energy, carbon, water) –rationale behind setting and overwriting defaults Ethical review •somewhat regularly described in some research fields, though rarely in structured terms –presence of an approval (via an approval number) –approving bodies –consent documentation (e.g. via consent forms) •rarely described in terms of structured metadata –policy trigger for that specific ethical review –permissions requested/ granted/ rejected –scope of the approval –relevant timelines Tackling knowledge gaps •proof assistants can formalize knowledge gaps –theorems, lemmas, conjectures, definitions •rarely described in terms of structured metadata –higher-level strategy for tackling a problem –circumscriptions of specific knowledge gaps