Infoscience: 20 years of open knowledge at EPFL

Inspired by the Open Access movement, Infoscience was created to centralize and showcase the academic and scientific output of EPFL researchers, teachers and students, making it freely accessible to the widest possible audience. Twenty years later, Infoscience offers nearly 180,000 publications and works - articles, theses, patents, reports, research data, and more - many of which are openly accessible. The platform also plays a key role in the ecosystem that daily supports the research community, promotes broad access to knowledge, and embodies the values of openness and sharing that are central to EPFL.

Infoscience is the EPFL institutional memory

Infoscience plays a crucial role in EPFL's commitment toward Open Science. By facilitating free access to publications (Green Open Access), the platform enables knowledge to be disseminated widely, and encourages exchanges among researchers, institutions and civil society. By making the research results as broadly accessible as possible, Infoscience supports the principle that knowledge should be shared, and that its dissemination can be independent from the main commercial scientific publishers, whose costs are constantly rising, undermining both authors and readers.

Infoscience, all the EPFL research in Open Access

A new interface
In July 2024, Infoscience reached an important milestone with the launch of a new version, the third one in 20 years. This update introduced new features designed to enhance the user experience, regardless of their profile. The new Infoscience interface provides a comprehensive and interconnected overview of research output, researcher profiles, and research laboratory details. This enhances the visibility of EPFL's academic output, by complying with international standards and improved interoperability. For the EPFL community benefit, upload and import processes have also been simplified and optimized. A personal dashboard enables each user to track his or her submissions. Finally, access to more comprehensive statistics and bibliometric indicators enables in-depth analysis of research output impact.

With Infoscience, we share the knowledge, we share our future

Infoscience Campaign: “20 Years of Open Access"
To celebrate this anniversary, the Library invited EPFL members to share their experiences with Infoscience over the two past decades. "Because Infoscience is valuable at each EPFL level, we interviewed doctoral students, researchers, and members of the Direction. These interviews provide an insight into the challenges and successes met by Infoscience users, while highlighting the impact of the repository on their academic and professional journeys" explained Julien Sicot, head of the Infoscience management and development team at the EPFL Library.

The interviews will be published from December 3 to 13, 2024 on the EPFL Library website:

• Jonas Schnidrig « Infoscience, all the EPFL research in Open Access »
  
• Anna Fontcuberta i Morral « With Infoscience, we share the knowledge, we share our future »
• Michel Bierlaire « Infoscience, a heritage and a window to the outside world »
  
  
• Esther Amstad « Infoscience, giving PhD students a lot of visibility »
• Anastasios Vassilopoulos « Infoscience is the open access library of EPFL »
• Pierre Dillenbourg « Infoscience is the EPFL internal library »
• Alexander Nebel « Infoscience is the EPFL institutional memory »
• Guillaume Anciaux « It’s important that information remains open and accessible »
• Julien Sicot « Infoscience is a window open on the science produced at EPFL »

Shaping the future
The future of Infoscience looks bright! The platform continues to evolve to take advantage of technological developments and adapt to new research challenges. It remains an essential tool for EPFL in implementing its Open Access policy, and more broadly in accomplishing its excellence and innovation mission. By celebrating 20 years of openness, we eagerly look to the future, ready to explore new ways for knowledge sharing, transparency and reproducibility of scientific research, and to facilitate collaboration between researchers and institutions worldwide.

Facts and figures

• 180,000 referenced works: scientific articles and publications, conference proceedings, posters, research data
• 30% of references have an open-access full text
• 100% of EPFL theses from 1920