A list of recommendations to improve the workflow of dataset metadata in the Flemish research landscape

Abstract

Flemish research performing institutions are obligated by the Flemish government to provide descriptive metadata on research entities (researchers, organisations, projects, publications, datasets, infrastructure, and patents) to Flanders Research Information Space (FRIS), the research portal of the Flemish government. FRIS is a Current Research Information System (CRIS) that collects and showcases information on publicly funded research carried out by Flemish research institutions. As a business information tool, FRIS reports research and development (R&D) and innovation indicators to the Flemish government and is used to monitor the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) resulting from the Flemish Open Science Policy. FRIS also serves as a discovery hub connecting with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) through OpenAIRE.

As part of the Open Science policy in Flanders, knowledge institutions have agreed to mandatorily register metadata of datasets that underlie publicly funded, peer-reviewed scientific articles and submit them to FRIS, commencing in 2019. To facilitate this process, the Flemish Open Science Board’s (FOSB) working group Metadata & Standardization, chaired by ECOOM-UHasselt, developed an application profile specifically for dataset metadata in 2020. The FOSB Application profile is built upon the DataCite model but has been expanded in order to effectively monitor the metrics of Open Science. The FOSB Application profile for dataset metadata ensures that the right information is available in FRIS to calculate the Open Data KPI. The Open Data KPI requires that, from 2019 onwards, datasets underlying peer-reviewed, Flemish-funded scientific publications should be openly accessible as far as possible (excluding legitimate opt-outs). Hence, the dataset metadata application profile facilitates the assessment of the proportion of ‘open’ datasets in terms of access level and data usage licenses.