Persée (UAR 3602) – Use Case 1

About the organisation

Persée is an academic research and support unit, affiliated to ENS de Lyon, CNRS, and supported by the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Space. Since 2003, Persée has been a leading player for the mass digitisation of French-speaking scientific literature and the broad dissemination as high-quality digital collections and data. The Persée portal, aimed at an academic audience, contains over 1,100,000 OA documents and 660 serial titles, mainly journals and books, dating from the late 19th century to the present day. Persée also provides several “perséides” (project-specific online corpora), a triplestore, and various data services, supporting Open Science.

As a massive digitisation platform with an end-to-end production chain and further automation and processing projects, Persée collaborates with over 200 partners from both the public and private sectors such as publishers and libraries, bibliodata and research data service providers, researchers and research teams, AI engineering professionals.

Since 2003, Persée has been working with editorial boards of public and commercial scientific publishers. Persée services ensure digital continuity between current publications and OA backfiles, copyright clearance and publishers’ heritage collections long-term preservation. Persée is also interoperable with other public and commercial electronic publication platforms such as Cairn, OpenEdition journals, Erudit.

Persée also plays a significant role in CollEx-Persée, the French research infrastructure that brings together academic and research libraries with French scientific information actors.

What challenges can the GRAPHIA project help solve?

Current difficulties and limitations in graph exploration ultimately exclude end users: steep learning curve, lack of user-friendliness, persistent silos of bibliographic data. New GUIs and new information retrieval methods could help. Besides, data and system interoperability is a prerequisite but interoperation remains hardly achieved. Is a better distributed approach to sharing possible? Last, readers and users must cope with a discontinuity in the discovery and reuse of collections and knowledge. Such a discontinuity lies between born-digital resources, digitised resources, and non-digitised/non-digital resources, between more recent and older materials, between heritage collections and current publications.

What is the proposed use case?

In support of Open Science and with a goal of offering “Collections as Data”, one mission of Persée is to disseminate and enhance the value of data from the retrospective digitisation of paper collections. This way, paper collections achieve the same digital visibility and usability as more recent publications data, research data, and other scientific material of interest. The use case involves creating new opportunities for semantic search across collections. It focuses on making possible the full discovery of newer and older resources, with the scientific information environment of the up and coming quarter of the 21st century, and the corresponding research practices in mind. Thus, the end users would encounter less usage friction, less information fragmentation and enjoy an extended digital informational landscape.

Several actions are proposed to better understand how the GRAPHIA project can support this use case:

• Feasibility study and provision of related scientific publication data, sourced from data.persee.fr or another data outlet (see the following question);
• Analysis of the knowledge graph and its properties, including a comparative study between Persée in-house graph and the GRAPHIA graph: data models crosswalk, connectivity, density, and assessment of data quality, consistency, and uniformity;
• Development of test cases, user testing in natural language: evaluating the added value, relevance, and potential in addressing the core issue, that is to say: enabling users to discover, in the same place, at the same time, and with the same tools, both born-digital scientific literature and the long tail of progressively digitised knowledge.

What type of SSH data or content are involved?

In this use case, Persée could readily provide bibliographic metadata (academic publications) and authority metadata (persons, organisations). Data is openly available, for instance through Persée triplestore, through Persée OAI-PMH server, and on demand.