Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
Searching EXPLORE for all OA outputs from a specific H2020 project to verify funder compliance.
- Is an instance
Browsing EXPLORE's open-access dashboard for a country to track national progress.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A search in a publisher platform is not OpenAIRE EXPLORE.
- Not an instance
Browsing Crossref's REST API directly is not OpenAIRE EXPLORE.
Editorial commentary
OpenAIRE EXPLORE is the public-facing discovery service of OpenAIRE (Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe), providing faceted search, statistical dashboards, and funder- and project-level pages over the OpenAIRE Graph. It is the primary “window” through which researchers, funders, and the public browse OpenAIRE’s aggregated corpus of publications, datasets, software, and ‘other research products’, without needing to query the underlying Graph programmatically. Every record surfaced in EXPLORE links back to its source repository or registration agency and to its persistent identifiers (DOIs, Handles, PMIDs, and others).
What problem it solves
The OpenAIRE Graph itself is a large, harvested and linked dataset — genuinely useful, but not something a programme officer or research administrator wants to query directly. EXPLORE puts a search box, facets, and pre-built dashboards on top of that Graph so someone can, for example, pull every open-access output funded by a specific Horizon Europe project without writing an API query, or check a country’s or funder’s open-access uptake trend over time from a ready-made chart rather than assembling one from raw records.
How a research office encounters OpenAIRE EXPLORE
- Verifying Horizon Europe or other EU-funder open-access compliance: searching EXPLORE for all outputs tied to a specific project or grant ID to confirm they are correctly linked and openly accessible.
- Checking whether an institution’s repository outputs are actually being aggregated correctly — if a paper is missing from EXPLORE, that is often a signal of an ‘OAI-PMH‘ harvesting or metadata problem at the source repository, not a problem with OpenAIRE itself.
- Using EXPLORE’s funder dashboards as a quick, citable snapshot of national or institutional open-access progress for reporting purposes.
- Following links from a project page in EXPLORE through to individual publications, datasets, and software outputs associated with that award, useful when compiling a project’s full output list for a final report.
What sits underneath EXPLORE
EXPLORE is a front-end over the OpenAIRE Graph, which is itself built by harvesting and linking records from repositories (largely via OAI-PMH), CRIS systems, Crossref, DataCite, ORCID, and other sources, then de-duplicating and connecting them into a single linked dataset (publications linked to their datasets, software, funding, and author/organisation identifiers). Understanding that layering matters for troubleshooting: a gap or error visible in EXPLORE usually traces back to a specific upstream source or a harvesting/linking step in the Graph, not to EXPLORE’s search interface itself.
How it relates to other terms in this cluster
- ‘OpenAIRE Graph‘ — the underlying linked dataset EXPLORE searches and visualises.
- ‘OAI-PMH‘ — the harvesting protocol behind much of the Graph’s repository-sourced content.
- ‘OpenAIRE Nexus‘ and ‘Argos (OpenAIRE)‘ — related OpenAIRE services for deposit and data-management planning respectively, distinct from EXPLORE’s discovery-only role.
Frequently asked questions
Is OpenAIRE EXPLORE the same as the OpenAIRE Graph? No — the Graph is the underlying linked dataset; EXPLORE is the public search and dashboard interface built on top of it. Developers who need programmatic access use the Graph’s API or bulk data dumps directly rather than EXPLORE’s web UI.
Does EXPLORE cover non-European research? Yes, in part — OpenAIRE aggregates globally wherever a repository, CRIS, or registration agency makes metadata available for harvesting, though its coverage and funder dashboards are strongest for European, and particularly EU-funded, research.
Why is a known publication missing from an EXPLORE search? Most commonly because the source repository or CRIS has not been successfully harvested (an OAI-PMH configuration issue), the record lacks the metadata needed for OpenAIRE’s de-duplication and linking, or the underlying Graph has not yet re-indexed a recent deposit.
References
- OpenAIRE, ‘EXPLORE’ (explore.openaire.eu).
Also known as
OpenAIRE Explore
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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