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ERICs (European Research Infrastructure Consortia) are European legal entities to facilitate the establishment and operation of Research Infrastructures with European interest. ERICs are increasingly asked to account for their operations (see debate on KPI in the ERIC Forum). At the same time, web services such as the EOSC Resource Catalogues, the SSH Open Marketplace, and OpenAire, provide possibilities to register and disseminate research outputs, making them ready for automatic harvesting. While the need for standardization of the description of ERIC provided services and content is still very much debated, there are also conceptual dimensions we would like to address in this paper. ERICs, by definition, create and operate in a landscape of distributed, co-created, network of processes. To summarize, services in the large domain of SSH, are increasingly ‘shared’ resources. In the spirit of Open Science and the further consolidation of the European Research Area, this interconnectedness can only be applauded. This is how the integrating function of ERICs materializes, and how we avoid the duplication of effort. At the same time, ERICs are also defined organizations with boundaries, and subject to individual assessments. To some extent ERICs are even in competition with each other, for visibility, user groups, in-kind contributions, funds allocated nationally and from the EC. This paper makes a first attempt to reflect about intrinsic challenges in accounting single nodes in a network of collaborating nodes. While each ERIC already defines its own policy of how to deal with this complexity according to their needs, there is a debate needed as to how to assess contributions to distributed infrastructures in a way which gives credit to all participating while at the same time avoid mis-allocation, double counting and so on, in particular in the context of the development of the EOSC. The matter of ethical, balanced, effective research assessment which has been discussed extensively in the realm of scholarly communication (Leiden Manifesto) also needs to be addressed in the area of research infrastructures. Such a reflection will inform the current discourse of further standardizing the metadata schema which are behind the different catalogues; the search for meaningful Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for ERICs and the further shaping of the collaboration and division of labor between ERIC’s at national and European level. This paper takes the current discourse around the DARIAH service portfolio as an example/case to highlight these more generic challenges. It also attempts to sort out various sources of ‘assignment uncertainty’ of contributions (e.g. differences in controlled vocabularies, incompatibilities of metadata schemes, user-generated content, metrics of assignments, and policy decisions). While we focus the discussion on ERICs, our motivation to present this at the DARIAH Annual event is that it might be of particular interest to see how cultural heritage institutions (libraries, archives, museums…), in their roles as content providers also for ERICs are credited for their contribution to ERICs, and beyond. References: Hicks, D., Wouters, P., Waltman, L. et al. Bibliometrics: The Leiden Manifesto for research metrics. Nature 520, 429–431 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/520429a See also http://www.leidenmanifesto.org |
