Mapping Climate Change Research via Open Repositories & AI: advantages and limitations for an evidence-based R&D policy-making
This work addresses the challenge of integrating open research data for evidence-based policy-making in climate change, but it is incremental as it focuses on a specific case study without introducing new methods.
The study examined the interoperability of four open access STI data sources (OpenAire, Open Alex, CORDIS, Kohesio) for mapping Climate Action research in Denmark's STI ecosystem, finding that limited interoperability hinders comprehensive analysis and reliable evidence for policy-making.
In the last few years, several initiatives have been starting to offer access to research outputs data and metadata in an open fashion. The platforms developed by those initiatives are opening up scientific production to the wider public and they can be an invaluable asset for evidence-based policy-making in Science, Technology and Innovation (STI). These resources can indeed facilitate knowledge discovery and help identify available R&D assets and relevant actors within specific research niches of interest. Ideally, to gain a comprehensive view of entire STI ecosystems, the information provided by each of these resources should be combined and analysed accordingly. To ensure so, at least a certain degree of interoperability should be guaranteed across data sources, so that data could be better aggregated and complemented and that evidence provided towards policy-making is more complete and reliable. Here, we study whether this is the case for the case of mapping Climate Action research in the whole Denmark STI ecosystem, by using 4 popular open access STI data sources, namely OpenAire, Open Alex, CORDIS and Kohesio.