«We want all our data to be transformed into useful knowledge»

The Dialnet Global Congress brought together more than 200 Spanish and Ibero-American open science specialists last week in Logroño. “We want all our data to be transformed into useful knowledge,” summarizes the director of the Dialnet Foundation, Elena López Tamayo.

– What is Dialnet already and what does it aspire to become?

– Dialnet is a complex system of scientific information, scientific results, research groups, science funding figures… In the Dialnet database there are always articles, theses or conference proceedings. That’s great, but it cannot be organized to make visible what you, as an organization, do. The CRIS system allows you to visualize all this: how you are organizationally structured and what your scientific production is. From there, functionalities begin to be built: for example, you can see the money that a university receives for projects and what scientific production it generates. This is still an information system: at Dialnet we have very good quality data, a team that works on it and we collaborate with many Spanish and Latin American universities. We have all that data organized and we are already able to display it well, but we want to do more.

– In what sense?

– We always talk about data spaces. That is information that comes to you from many sources, that you enrich it, put it in formats that your systems understand well and from there you can create multiple use cases.

– For example?

– For example: I want to see what scientific-technical infrastructure my university has or I want the machine to give me a summary of scientific articles on a certain subject or to suggest relationships between researchers… If the system aggregates the information from all the universities Spanish, that is starting to be important. I can quickly know who is researching nanotechnology applied to antibiotics and the system will also order them based on the quality of their research. I can use artificial intelligence to generate knowledge maps and know where scientific production is concentrated. It can even serve as a tool to know where scientific advances can occur and where public authorities finance certain research.

– Dialnet Global has the advantage of being built on Dialnet, which is a success story. This leap forward that is now intended, how long can it take and what cost can it entail?

– We have not made the journey here alone. This is a collaborative project and must remain so: that is the model of success. Our users are universities and research centers. The deadline we have right now to achieve extremely ambitious objectives is the duration of the Recovery Mechanism, since part of it is financed by that mechanism and part by the Government of La Rioja. We have until December 2025.

– But it shouldn’t end there, I guess.

– Clear; This is not reaching December 2025 and it’s over. It is a project that we are building so that we can ensure its sustainability. That is to say, if we have grown in staff to offer certain functionalities, we can maintain all of this beyond 2025. The budget of the collaboration agreement that we have with the Government of La Rioja is six million for 2023, 2024 and 2025.

– This is a project with international ambition, but it was born linked to a small university. Is there a lot of competition? Maybe other universities that, with more muscle, can try to do the same?

– It is true that Dialnet is a model of success that was born from a small university in the smallest autonomous community in Spain. But there has lain its success. There was a group of people in the UR Library and in the IT service who believed that there were possibilities of creating a large digital library with the greatest number of contents in Spanish. That’s it, so right now I think there is no one who can do what Dialnet does. It is true that there are multinationals and commercial companies that do have these databases, but they offer their products at market prices. We, on the other hand, are a non-profit foundation; All the information on Dialnet is open access. The only thing we do is ensure the sustainability of our products. The database is open to anyone, but if a university asks us to develop a CRIS system – there are now about 40 – we charge the cost of the development.

– Are we only talking about scientific production in Spanish or also in other languages?

– In the Dialnet database, those 9.3 million documents, much of the content is in Spanish. But when we create the information systems – the CRIS – of what is produced at a university, we bring with us all the scientific production of the researchers at that university, whether in Spanish, English or Chinese. Now, with multilingual models, I can apply artificial intelligence without paying attention to the language in which it is written.

– And Latin America? Is it an expansion territory?

– It is a clear field for expansion. He who knows you, knows you a lot and uses your system. Of the 3 million registered users on Dialnet, half are Latin American. Another thing is that they are our collaborators. The collaborators are universities that enter information into the system. In Ibero-America there are 55 collaborating universities (in Spain there are 66 and there are 40 other types of institutions). The number is high, but Latin America is a world and each country has its idiosyncrasies.

– A question from an occasional user. Why are there many references in Dialnet but, for the most part, the full text is not available?

– This is motivated by the scientific production system. The same thing happens all over the world. It has just been defined in these days by Professor Roberto Escalante (general secretary of the Union of Universities of Latin America and the Caribbean): states pay for science to be produced, researchers pay for their articles to be published in certain journals and the user pays to access them. That does not depend on Dialnet; This is how the system is built. But the open science model advocates breaking this vicious circle. In theory, everything that is publicly funded should be available to society; In practice, it happens more and more, but that dependency continues. I believe, however, that the time is not far away when we will have much more open content. We give open everything that is open, and everything is accessible.