Science 2.0 Repositories

Information and communication technology (ICT) advances in research infrastructures are continuously changing the way research and scientific communication are performed. Scientists, funders, and organisations are moving the paradigm of Research Publishing well beyond traditional articles. The aim is to pursue an holistic approach where publishing includes any product (e.g. publications, datasets, experiments, software, web sites, blogs) resulting from a research activity and relevant to the interpretation, evaluation, and reuse of the activity or part of it. We show that the implementation of this vision is today mainly inspired by literature scientific communication workflows, which separate the “where” research is conducted from the “where” research is published and shared. We claim that this model cannot fit well with scientific communication practice envisaged in Science 2.0 settings and propose a new class of scientific data repositories, denominated “Science 2.0 Repositories” (SciRepos), as a possible solution. SciRepos address the data pub lishing issues by blurring the distinction between research life-cycle and research publishing. They enable effective scientific communication workflows by making research products creation and publishing occur “within” the research infrastructure and “during” the research activities. We present the benefits resulting from Publishing in SciRepos and define a Reference Model and a Reference Architecture for a SciRepo platform, a general purpose platform facilitating the realisation of a SciRepo over any ICT-based research infrastructure environment with limited costs and efforts if compared with from-scratch approaches.