Episciences is a platform to publish diamond open access overlay journals. The ambition is to provide the scientific communities with the technical means to produce high quality scientific journals, at an efficient cost, compliant by design with FAIR principles. Episciences provides a community-driven and academic-led publishing platform open to any disciplines and supported by leading funders in the scientific community. The platform promotes the principles of open access and eases the transition from traditional publishing models to community-owned models based on open access archives. Our model allows for immediate open access and single blind or open access peer review of scientific content. Authors also retain all their rights through the use of Creative Commons licences.

The core content (preprints/published articles/open peer review reports/datasets/softwares) of our overlay journals is hosted on open repositories (arXiv; Zenodo; HAL and soon bioRxiv/medRxiv). With this publishing approach, we need to manage multiple APIs and metadata models to be able to ingest content from various open repositories. The OAI-PMH protocol and Dublin Core models have their limitations in terms of metadata coverage and need to be complemented by other specific APIs. For example, not all repositories expose ORCID for authors or research projects with their metadata sets. In addition, repository metadata may be enhanced over time, providing new opportunities that may be missed because repository content is not synchronised after a document is published. New PIDs may also become available after publication with metadata from sources external to the repositories, e.g. ORCIDs when authors add a publication to their lists, ROR identifiers may be created, a dataset may cite an article, etc.

Thanks to OpenAIRE and the OpenAIRE Nexus project, Episciences has been included in the EOSC Marketplace and is interoperable with the other services of the OpenAIRE Catalogue.

It has enabled our platform to create new workflows to add post-publication enrichment to our metadata. We have leveraged several open science services such as OpenAIRE Graph, Scholexplorer, OpenCitations, OpenAIRE Provide/Broker/UsageCounts. This allowed us to automatically add thousands of ORCIDs to already published articles. Nearly 800 research projects were discovered, thousands of publications or related datasets and thousands of documents citing our own publications.

This enriched metadata is in turn offered to other services for harvesting and dissemination. For example, metadata sent to Crossref for our DOIs. Our enriched metadata is also available for harvesting with our OAI-PMH endpoint which is compatible with the OpenAIRE guidelines. This allows OpenAIRE Provide to harvest our new metadata which is then available in OpenAIRE Explore and OpenAIRE Graph. 

The process works best with content published a few months ago and it is a process of continuous improvement. The more metadata we add and expose, the more likely it is that new metadata will be found. Thanks to the collaboration between OpenAIRE and Episciences, documents published by our overlay journals are more visible and discoverable in many open science services.