This content is also available in:
Sci-GaIA activities that aim to strengthen and expand e-Infrastructure and Science Gateway related services:
- Support the creation of an African Open (and Linked) Data infrastructure, interoperable and federated with those existing in the EU and other regions of the world. The main outcome of this activity so far has been the creation of the Sci-GaIA Open Access Repository (OAR). The Sci-GaIA OAR is based on the latest stable release of Invenio and it is both an Open Archives Initiative conforming repository and an official OpenDOAR data provider. In the context of Sci-GaIA, the team at the University of Catania has extended Invenio functionalities adding:
- The possibility to mint DataCite Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and assign them to the records stored in the OAR;
- If existing, direct links to the altmetrics of each of the records contained in the OAR (see, for example, this record);
- The correct metadata structure and the right OAI-PMH endpoint configuration to make the OAR compliant with version 3.0 of the OpenAIRE Guidelines.
The Sci-GaIA OAR and the others cloned and deployed using the virtual appliance and the guides developed by the project are included both in the e-Infrastructure Knowledge Base and in the Semantic Search Engine, which are two of the commons of the Sci-GaIA Open Science Platform.
During the month of January 2017, an agreement has been established between UNICT and CRUI, which includes the possibility to provide DOI-prefixes to all African organisations wishing to deploy and institutional Open Access Repository (see this press release). So far, four (4) prefixes have been requested by and assigned to the following organisations:
- The African Population Health Research Center (APHRC), headquartered in Kenya but international;
- The Eko-Konnect Research and Education Initiative, Nigeria;
- The Ministry of Education of Ethiopia, for the Ethiopian Research and Education Network (EthERNet);
- The Ubuntunet Alliance, Malawi - partner of Sci-GaIA,
representing a huge base of organisations aiming at deploying FAIR Open Access archives. Indeed, an unlimited number of sub-prefixes can be created out of a DOI-prefix and an unlimited number of DOIs can be created out of a sub-prefix.
- Deploy Policy Management Authorities and Identity Federations across African NRENs. The current status of federated services deployed in Africa, including those developed in the context of Sci-GaIA during its lifetime, is shown in this page. Thanks to Sci-GaIA activities, since the 26th of August 2016, the “catch-all” GrIDP (Grid IDentity Pool) federation is an official member of the eduGAIN inter-federation, the first non-country-based member. GrIDP is jointly managed by the Division of Catania of the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics and by the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Catania. The central services of the federation are hosted at GARR, the Italian National Research and Education Network.
- Deploy the Africa Grid Science Gateway developed in eI4Africa at an African Institution. The Africa Grid Science Gateway was conceived and developed in the framework of eI4Africa proejct and is now actively supported by Sci-GaIA. Since the beginning of 2017, the Africa Grid Science Gateway has been relocated at the Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology (DIT) in Tanzania. Click the icon below to access the service at DIT.
The final report on services development and deployment, D3.2 - Science Gateway and e-Infrastructure Service Provision: Update and Sustainability, can be downloaded from here.