Pathways: Augmenting interoperability across scholarly repositories

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new interoperability framework and data model to connect diverse scholarly repositories, enabling complex workflows like overlay journal creation across heterogeneous systems.

Contribution

It introduces a simple data model and service architecture to enhance cross-repository interoperability for scholarly communication workflows.

Findings

Demonstrated deployment across Fedora, aDORe, DSpace, and arXiv repositories.

Enabled creation of overlay journals through heterogeneous systems.

Showed practical feasibility of the proposed interoperability framework.

Abstract

In the emerging eScience environment, repositories of papers, datasets, software, etc., should be the foundation of a global and natively-digital scholarly communications system. The current infrastructure falls far short of this goal. Cross-repository interoperability must be augmented to support the many workflows and value-chains involved in scholarly communication. This will not be achieved through the promotion of single repository architecture or content representation, but instead requires an interoperability framework to connect the many heterogeneous systems that will exist. We present a simple data model and service architecture that augments repository interoperability to enable scholarly value-chains to be implemented. We describe an experiment that demonstrates how the proposed infrastructure can be deployed to implement the workflow involved in the creation of an overlay journal over several different repository systems (Fedora, aDORe, DSpace and arXiv).