Integration of national publication databases – towards a high-quality and comprehensive information base on scholarly publications in Europe

The need for a comprehensive infrastructure for scholarly publication information has been on the EU’s agenda for a long time. Also, the European Commission’s open science policy highlights the necessity of a good information base to follow up open access publishing across Europe. However, an all-inclusive information infrastructure on research publications is still missing. During the past 10 years, European countries have invested significantly in national research information infrastructures. Now, at least 20 European countries have a national database for research publication metadata. The strength of these databases lies in their comprehensiveness and quality assurance since they often have a mandatory nature. They are, however, neither yet integrated nor widely used for cross- country comparisons. To this end, a proof of concept of a European publication infrastructure was carried out in the framework of ENRESSH (www.enressh.eu). The ENRESSH-VIRTA-PoC integrated publication data from four countries and the concept was built on the strengths of the Finnish national VIRTA system. This paper highlights the results from the PoC and outlines future steps towards the integration of national publication databases in Europe.