Science and technology

Science, as well as its possible technological applications, heavily rely upon: - Data provenance - recording what we did and how we did it; - Knowledge transfer - explaining the research to someone else; - Reproducibility - verifying or invalidating the research of others. To fully achieve these ideals, open science practices are necessary. Given the complexity of 21st century science, full details of the research methods must be open to public scrutiny for there to be any hope of achieving scientific reproducibility. A key policy document on this matter is the EC Recommendation on Access to and Preservation of Scientific Information (July 2012). It states: “Preservation of scientific research results is in the public interest. It has traditionally been under the responsibility of libraries, especially national legal deposit libraries. The volume of research results generated is growing tremendously. Mechanisms, infrastructures and software solutions should be in place to enable long-term preservation of research results in digital form.” Furthermore, “Solid eInfrastructures underpinning the scientific information system will improve access to scientific information and the long-term preservation of it. This can boost collaborative research.” As the above Recommendation makes clear, there is a strong link to the drive for openness in data and publications in scientific research. Benefitting from long-term preservation requires that the digital resources are to some extent open to access by present and future users. This drive for openness is partly motivated by a societal imperative that the results of publicly-funded research should be publicly available, and is enabled by new technologies. This collection is aimed at sharing experiences and solutions in the domain of science and technology with a focus on interoperability and reusability of data.