About

Why OPEN POLAR?

 

There is a 60% findability gap of the polar
records based on the records numbers of 115
metadata providers (doi.org/10.7557/7.4682)

This 60% findability gap raises an awareness sign of the need of the scientific community to create a homogeneous, seamless database of the open-access records about the polar regions and making this database available to researchers, students and the wider public through one search platform.

Based on the obligations and the motivations of the University of Tromsø – the Arctic University of Norway (UiT) toward making research data and research documents available to the scientific community, UiT together with the Norwegian Polar Institute launched the OPEN POLAR project.

 

Our Vision and aims

is to offer a unique and comprehensive service that makes polar research results more easy to find.

To attract more researchers, students and decision makers to use the service, we aim to add three additional subservices:
1) archiving original data from the Polar Regions;
2) creating a research platform;
3) creating an education platform.

The integration between the main service (i.e. make open-access polar records more
visible and findable) and the three new subservices.

Added values

  • Since the service will cover cross-disciplinary sciences and will focus on Polar Regions, it will be a useful tool for politicians and decision-makers.
  • Our service will cover both publications and research data (note that very few search engines consider the research data as a target for their services).
  • The service will provide quick access to open publications and research data by providing links to full text for each record that allow end-users to get what they are looking for in the shortest time.
  • The service will rely on continuous recommendations from reference and editorial boards. The reference board will  help ensure that the service meets the needs of the scientific community, while the editorial board will suggest new metadata providers and broadcast the service internationally.

 

Build upon existing experience

The new service builds upon experiences from High North Research Documents (i.e. an existing service at the UiT). The High North Reseach Documents has more than 1,000,000 records primarily related to the Arctic region.

 

How will we do that?

Using different technics for automatic extraction of metadata from different sources of polar research results, the OPEN POLAR will create a collection of metadata of the openly available research data and research publications. This collection will be the core resource for OPEN POLAR. End-users can perform search using a map. The presentation of the results from a search can be as a classic list, as a timeline or as a map view.

 

Organization

OPEN POLAR is a joint project between the University of Tromsø – the Arctic University of Norway and the Norwegian Polar Institute. The University Library (UB) hosts the project.