In this blog post, we’re going to introduce you to the partners of the SoFAIR project. Each partner brings something different to the table, which is essential for achieving our project’s goals. You’ll get to know the diverse institutions and teams that contribute to the success of SoFAIR, and we’ll highlight their roles and the specific strengths they offer to the collaboration.
The Open University (Project Coordinator)
The Open University (OU) is the UK’s largest higher education institution and a world leader in flexible distance learning. Since its foundation in 1969, the OU has educated over 2 million students worldwide. It currently serves more than 170,000 students, including over 15,000 international students. The OU’s team on this project is the KMi’s Big Scientific Data and Text Analytics group, which specializes in web-scale scholarly text and data mining, as well as machine learning to support research and open science. The team also oversees CORE (core.ac.uk), a global scholarly infrastructure that attracts millions of unique visitors every month.
The Open University is the project coordinator for the SoFAIR project. The OU is in charge of the project and will lead the Management (WP1) and Integration (WP6) work packages.
National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (INRIA)
Inria is the French national institute for research in digital science and technology. Since January 2024, it has also been responsible for the Agence de programmes dans le numérique (Digital Programs Agency), aimed at enhancing the collective dynamics of higher education and research. Inria’s core principles are rooted in world-class research, technological innovation, and entrepreneurial risk-taking. With over 3,800 scientists distributed across 220 project teams—many in collaboration with major research universities—Inria explores new research frontiers, often through interdisciplinary partnerships with industrial stakeholders, to address ambitious challenges.
In the project, Inria will focus on three main aspects: improving and integrating the software recognition and disambiguation modules previously tested within the GROBID software to adapt them to the project’s defined scenarios, ensuring a proper connection to the Software Heritage infrastructure to link software mentions in scholarly papers to the appropriate open source entries, and designing a specific user scenario at the deposit stage within the French national repository HAL.
Brno University of Technology
The Knowledge Technology (KnoT) Research Group at the Faculty of Information Technology (FIT), Brno University of Technology (BUT), Czech Republic, has a long track record in research related to knowledge extraction from text and multimedia, advanced machine learning methods in semantic processing, and evaluation of large-scale information processing solutions. The group has actively participated in several European and national research projects and initiatives, including SAUCE (Smart Asset re-Use in Creative Environments), OCCAM (OCR, Classification & Machine Translation), MASAPI (Multilingual Assistant for Searching, Analysing and Processing Information and Decision-Making Support), and EnetCollect (Large-Scale Information Extraction and Gamification for Crowdsourced Language Learning).
In the SoFAIR project, BUT will lead WP5 and provide technical support for the demonstrators. In addition, BUT will contribute to the development of the extraction and linking models (WP4) and the tools for the CORE system, which are components of the SoFAIR workflow (WP6). The University will also be responsible for maintaining the project website.
Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL-PAN)
The Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL-PAN) is a leading national center for documentation, bibliography, and scholarly editions, as well as a pioneer in the adoption of digital methods in the humanities. Recognized for its excellence, IBL-PAN was ranked in the ‘Excellent’ category (A+ or A) in the two most recent national evaluations of research institutions in 2017 and 2021. In 2016, the European Commission awarded the Institute the certificate of ‘HR Excellence in Research’. The Digital Humanities Centre at IBL-PAN is the department responsible for the Institute’s participation in the project.
As part of the project, IBL PAN will carry out work related to communicating and disseminating the results of the work, planning, implementing, and reporting on all relevant activities, and ensuring that the project is fully involved in joint events such as international conferences. A key contribution of IBL PAN to the SoFAIR project will also be to participate in the work on manual data annotation to improve the machine learning models of the software’s mention extraction and disambiguation component.
European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI)
The European Molecular Biology Laboratory’s European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) is a key unit within the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), an intergovernmental research organization funded by over 20 member states. EMBL-EBI is a strong advocate of open data in the life sciences and hosts Europe PMC, a comprehensive repository providing access to 41.5 million publications, preprints, and other documents in the life sciences literature from trusted sources.
In the SoFAIR project, EMBL-EBI will play an important role by contributing to the monthly project calls and providing essential support and input to the project development process. Europe PMC will ingest the annotations provided to its platform, make them available via the API, and endeavor to display these annotations on its website. This involvement leverages EMBL-EBI’s expertise in data integration, FAIRification of text-mined outputs, and building pipelines for different data types, ultimately contributing to the project’s goals of improving open science and research workflows.