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For Content Providers
Explore for Content Providers

You are the backbone
of open science.

Repositories, OA journals and CRIS systems, of every type and every size, are where research actually lives. Every deposit you host, every record you maintain, is a building block of the open science infrastructure that researchers, institutions and funders across Europe and the world depend on.

Our job is to connect what you hold to everything else, grants, authors, organisations, related outputs, and to give something back in return: visibility, usage statistics, and enrichments you could not generate on your own. This page covers how.

Guidelines & validation

Before your source can be harvested, it needs to meet the OpenAIRE Guidelines, a set of metadata and interoperability requirements that ensure your records can be reliably parsed, deduplicated and linked across the graph.

What the guidelines cover

  • Metadata format and vocabulary
    Dublin Core or a richer OpenAIRE-compatible schema, with controlled vocabularies for resource type, access rights and licence.
  • Persistent identifiers
    DOIs or other resolvable identifiers wherever possible, plus author identifiers (ORCID) and funder or grant identifiers in the record.
  • Rights and licensing information
    Clear, machine-readable access rights and licence statements so OA route classification (Gold, Green, Diamond, Hybrid, Bronze) can be determined automatically.
  • A working OAI-PMH endpoint
    The standard harvesting protocol OpenAIRE uses to collect and refresh your metadata on an ongoing basis.

Not sure if you comply? The OpenAIRE Validator lets you test your OAI-PMH endpoint against the guidelines before you register, so you can fix issues ahead of time rather than after submission.

Read the OpenAIRE Guidelines
Open the Validator

Register via PROVIDE

PROVIDE is the OpenAIRE dashboard for content providers. It is where you register your source, monitor how your content is being harvested and deduplicated, and see your own aggregation statistics over time.
  • Validate, then register
    Confirm your endpoint against the Guidelines first, then submit your source in PROVIDE. Full instructions and every field are explained inside PROVIDE itself.
  • Live aggregation status
    Once approved, PROVIDE shows your harvesting schedule, record counts and any validation issues as they arise, no need to ask us.
  • You are not doing this alone
    A dedicated OpenAIRE team is on hand throughout the process, helping you resolve validation issues, improve your compatibility, and increase the visibility of your content once you are connected.

Already registered? Sign in to PROVIDE to check your current aggregation status, download harvesting reports, or update your endpoint details.

Go to PROVIDE

EOSC compatibility

Meeting the OpenAIRE Guidelines does more than get you into the OpenAIRE Graph, it makes your source compatible with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). One registration, one set of guidelines, discoverability across the entire European open science infrastructure.
  • No separate EOSC registration needed
    OpenAIRE-compliant sources are automatically recognised as EOSC-compatible content providers. You do the work once.
  • Visible across the European infrastructure
    Your content becomes discoverable not just in Explore, but across every EOSC-connected service and portal that draws on the shared graph.
  • Counted toward national and EU open science targets
    Aggregated, standards-compliant content is what national and EU-level open access monitoring is built on. Being connected means being counted.
Go to EOSC EU Node

Share usage data, increase your relevance

Views and downloads on your platform are a signal of relevance and impact, but only if that signal reaches the wider graph. Sharing your usage statistics with OpenAIRE means your content ranks more accurately in search, and your usage counts are aggregated across every mirror and re-indexing of your records, not just your own site.

Adopt COUNTER or a compatible log format, then connect to the UsageCounts service, most platforms support this natively or via a plugin. Once connected, usage across every source hosting the same record is combined into a single, deduplicated count, shown on Explore and available via the API.

Why it matters for ranking. Usage signal feeds directly into how relevant a result appears in Explore search, records with tracked usage are more discoverable, not just better documented.

Learn about UsageCounts

Integrate funding data

The single biggest driver of how well a deposit connects to the rest of the graph is whether it carries a grant identifier. Capturing funding information at the point of deposit, rather than after the fact, is what allows a publication to appear automatically on its project page and count toward funder compliance reporting.
  • A funder and grant ID field
    Add a structured field to your deposit form where depositors can select the funder and enter (or look up) the grant ID, rather than relying on free-text acknowledgements.
  • Autocomplete against the OpenAIRE funder database
    Either download the funding database homogenised by our team or hook to our lookup service for major funders and their grants, so depositors can search rather than type, reducing mismatches.
  • Include the identifier in your exported metadata
    Make sure the grant ID is present in the OAI-PMH record you expose, not just stored internally, so it is actually harvested and linked.

Small change, outsized effect. A single structured field is often the difference between an output that is invisible to its funder and one that is automatically counted in every compliance report.

Full texts and the Broker

Metadata alone only goes so far. When you share the full text, PDF or structured XML, of your content with OpenAIRE, it can be mined for citations, funding acknowledgements, data availability statements and links to related outputs that metadata-only harvesting would miss entirely. The OpenAIRE Broker then sends the enrichments it discovers back to you.

Your PDFs stay with us, and only with us. Full texts you share are used exclusively for internal text mining. OpenAIRE does not redistribute, expose or share your PDFs or XMLs with any third party, service, or public download, unless there is an agreement with you. Only the extracted, structured enrichments, citation links, funding mentions, related-resource links, are ever passed on, never the source files themselves.

What sharing full text enables

  • Citation and reference extraction
    Full-text mining identifies citation links your metadata never captured, connecting your content to the papers it cites and is cited by.
  • Funding acknowledgements found in text
    Grant numbers mentioned in the acknowledgements section, even when missing from structured metadata, are detected and proposed as links.
  • Links to datasets and software
    Data availability statements and repository links inside the full text are parsed and connected to the relevant dataset or software record.
  • Richer classification
    The full text gives our classifiers far more to work with than an abstract alone, improving automatic tagging by Field of Science, Sustainable Development Goal, technology, and more.

You share full text alongside your regular metadata harvest, our pipelines mine it automatically, and the Broker sends the enrichments it discovers back to you to review and accept, individually or in bulk. The Broker interface walks you through the review step once you are connected.

A two-way relationship. This is the clearest expression of what we mean by giving back, you share content once, and get structured, validated enrichments in return, for free, indefinitely.

Access Broker via Provide