Open Access

NOA is a search engine for scientific images from open access publications based on full text indexing of all text referring to the images and filtering for disciplines and image type. Images will be annotated with Wikipedia categories for better discoverability and for uploading to WikiCommons. Currently we have indexed approximately 2,7 Million images from over 710 000 scientific papers from all fields of science.

A new FOSS (free and open source software) toolchain and associated workflow is being developed in the context of NFDI4Culture, a German consortium of research- and cultural heritage institutions working towards a shared infrastructure for research data that meets the needs of 21st century data creators, maintainers and end users across the broad spectrum of the digital libraries and archives field, and the digital humanities. This short paper and demo present how the integrated toolchain connects: 1) OpenRefine - for data reconciliation and batch upload; 2) Wikibase - for linked open data (LOD) storage; and 3) Kompakkt - for rendering and annotating 3D models. The presentation is aimed at librarians, digital curators and data managers interested in learning how to manage research datasets containing 3D media, and how to make them available within an open data environment with 3D-rendering and collaborative annotation features.

The NOA project collects and stores images from open access publications and makes them findable and reusable. During the project a focus group workshop was held to determine whether the development is addressing researchers’ needs. This took place before the second half of the project so that the results could be considered for further development since addressing users’ needs is a big part of the project. The focus was to find out what content and functionality they expect from image repositories. In a first step, participants were asked to fill out a survey about their images use. Secondly, they tested different use cases on the live system. The first finding is that users have a need for finding scholarly images but it is not a routine task and they often do not know any image repositories. This is another reason for repositories to become more open and reach users by integrating with other content providers. The second finding is that users paid attention to image licenses but struggled to find and interpret them while also being unsure how to cite images. In general, there is a high demand for reusing scholarly images but the existing infrastructure has room to improve.