EOSC-IF / Interoperability guideline: research product deposition

Open Science calls for researchers to publish as soon as possible any type of research product in such a way their research activity can be transparently assessed, reviewed, reproduced, and rewarded in all its aspects. However, the publishing process has become more and more a burden for scientists, who must, most of the time, spend time to publish their articles, data, software, and other products in the many institutional or thematic repositories of reference. Scenarios include first-time publishing of new resource products or double-publishing of research products, to satisfy institutional mandates and community practices. Such tedious work is often incomplete, with some products ending up unpublished and others showing incomplete or imprecise metadata. Some communities investigated and realised the integration of their research performing services, from research infrastructures and clusters, with repositories for research product deposition. The integration ensures that outcomes of such services are deposited automatically, prior authorization of the users, into a given repository, giving life to an end-to-end scientific workflow, from experimentation to publishing. The limit of existing approaches is to be bound to a specific repository API and format; introducing multiple repositories as potential targets of deposition for the service, multiplies the problem, as bilateral interactions with the respective repository API must be established. For example, the Zenodo deposition API and the B2SHARE API are similar but different in many ways; a service willing to automate publishing into either repositories would require implementing and maintaining two different workflows. For the EOSC to act as enabler for Open Science practices, its Interoperability Framework should guide services of research infrastructures and clusters of the EOSC on how to implement (semi-)automated workflows for the deposition and consumption of research products. To support different integration options, two modalities are supported by these guidelines: SWORD protocol v3 for push mode and a combination of COAR Notify and Signposting for pull mode. The EOSC guidelines for research product onboarding are suggested as metadata exchange format.