Dr Suzanne Dumouchel, Scientific Coordinator of the TRIPLE project, Partnership Coordinator of OPERAS Research Infrastructure & Head of International Cooperation at CNRS & her team developed the multilingual, interdisciplinary discovery service GoTriple that aims to foster collaboration & interdisciplinary research
In the social sciences and humanities especially, the accessibility and the outreach of research, its results, and resources have suffered from being fragmented along the lines of disciplines and languages. The platform GoTriple, developed by the TRIPLE project (2019-2023), presents a multilingual, interdisciplinary solution for this issue.
The interdisciplinary discovery service is designed to support collaboration, multilingualism and interdisciplinarity in the social sciences and humanities while simultaneously offering a broad spectrum of additional features and improving the access, use and reuse of research resources in the social sciences and humanities.
Since the end of the TRIPLE project in March 2023, the platform has been under the supervision of OPERAS, the research infrastructure seeking to drive open scholarly communication in the European Research Area forward. GoTriple is maintained and updated as part of the OPERAS service portfolio.
Discovering research & collaboration
As an interdisciplinary discovery service, GoTriple stands out because the platform comes with an inbuilt thesaurus that was specifically developed to allow multilingual search queries in 11 languages and is expendable. The multilingual design of the platform will enable its users to broaden their research scope easily. Researching scientific publications automatically in several languages takes only one search query.
Metadata regarding publications and projects for the Social Sciences and Humanities are automatically harvested, mapped in the TRIPLE data model, curated, enriched and finally saved in the GoTriple platform’s indexes. This poses not only a significant improvement in efficiency but is a contribution to the discoverability of these publications as well as they are neither hidden behind barriers of language nor limited to disciplines.
To take that experience of interdisciplinarity and connection even further, GoTriple also allows users to register and set up a profile, allowing them to claim articles written by them and display their expertise and projects in which they are involved. As of May 2023, the platform grants access to 9,362,924 documents, 21,823 projects and 7,766,737 profiles. Steadily increasing, these numbers not only prove GoTriple already enables access to research for anyone but provides an insight into the platform’s potential for the future.
“The vision that is GoTriple really consists in the idea that anyone, really anyone, regardless of language, profession or anything else can access research and participate in it; in short, that the results of research are an integral part of society and that all of these results should be as available as possible,” Dr Suzanne Dumouchel says.
Innovative features enhance the discovery experience and foster collaboration
Additionally, the platform combines several innovative features to enhance the discovery experience and foster collaboration among projects and scholars alike:
- A Recommender System specifically designed to point users to research, profiles and projects of interest to them.
- The Trust Building System is a social network built to enhance collaboration based on trust.
- Pundit, an online annotation tool, allows users to annotate articles online, save and organise their annotations, and share them with their peers for easier collaboration.
- The OPERAS crowdfunding channel, the first crowdfunding service for projects from the social sciences and humanities dedicated to exploring innovative ways of funding and communication.
- A visualisation tool, which allows search results to be displayed either as a knowledge map or a streamgraph.
All of these features have been integrated into the interdisciplinary discovery and are available via the platform directly – all with the user experience in mind, as Suzanne Dumouchel explains:
“Researching means using a lot of different resources and tools, often simultaneously. Switching services, tools, websites takes up a lot of time. With GoTriple, we offer a European hub for research, combining tools with the access to resources in one place.”
This innovative approach is a model functioning well that opens up opportunities for projects from the social sciences and humanities: For example, a crowdfunding campaign run in the summer of 2022 for the project “SUES – Supporting Ukrainian Editorial Staff” initially raised more than €20,000 via their campaign. Donations continued after the official end of the crowdfunding campaign due to the communication campaign drafted as part of the crowdfunding initiative. As a result, the project raised more than €73,000, allowing the organisational team to support more than 45 journals.
The multilingual, interdisciplinary discovery service tends to the needs of a growing international community
This example highlights that the platform’s innovative features and its decidedly multilingual, interdisciplinary design do indeed tend to the needs of a growing international community. Still, it also underlines that research and society are intrinsically intertwined. With its combination of metadata enrichment, innovative features and multilingual design, GoTriple offers the international research community in social sciences and humanities the opportunity to take interdisciplinarity and collaboration to the next level.
Moreover, GoTriple allows companies or public organisations to use and reuse scientific outputs for their own purposes, especially in improving economic, societal, and scientific innovations.
The vocabulary developed for GoTriple is openly available by clicking here.
