Introduction to SciX: Astrobiologists do their best work when they can find, access, and build upon existing results, datasets, and software from many fields. The Science Explorer (SciX; scixplorer.org) is the digital library designed to facilitate finding, accessing, and reusing research products in planetary science, astronomy, Earth science, heliophysics, and NASA-funded research in the physical and biological sciences. Based on over three decades of success with the Astrophysical Data System (ADS), the same team is expanding those open science services and practices to support all the NASA science disciplines. In fact, SciX considers essential to its mission the Force11 FAIR principles (Wilkinson et al., 2016): Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability. SciX provides a rich environment for finding literature, datasets, and software across multiple disciplines. Expert human librarians and robust machine-learning algorithms describe each item in the SciX collections well, index key concepts in the content, and identify additional resources to which each text should be connected, such as grant proposals. SciX works with NASA data archives to index their high-level datasets properly and to link papers directly to the appropriate data. In addition to traditional “first author” or “author and date” searches, SciX has powerful query tools that enable astrobiologists to explore the literature by topic, find papers similar to one of interest, read review-level papers on a topic, and identify what is most useful to someone working on a topic. Alternatively, a researcher can visualize the collaborations working on a topic or subtopics associated with their primary topic. SciX matches the publisher’s official version with known e-print or PubMed Central (PMC) open access versions to assist astrobiologists in accessing the full text. Because SciX links to all versions from a single record, the researcher can find the most trustworthy research information and choose the access method that suits them best. To support interoperability across research platforms, SciX provides multiple identifiers for each resource, including DOIs for the published and e-print versions of an article. Through its API, SciX empowers astrobiologists to incorporate it into their existing research systems or build novel workflows using its collections. By making literature, datasets, and software findable and accessible, SciX encourages astrobiologists to reuse and build upon the relevant work they discover. Consequently, SciX also provides tools to make citation easier. A researcher can copy and paste a single citation in a multitude of formats or export a longer list of citations to create a bibliography for a paper or curriculum vitae. Custom formats are also possible. The development of personalized libraries within SciX provides even more flexibility. SciX for Astrobiology: The NASA Astrobiology Program is now maintaining their ongoing publications list as a public library within SciX (see https://science.nasa.gov/astrobiology/ under the heading For Researchers / Astrobiology Publications). By choosing “View as Search Results,” a researcher can search, filter, sort, visualize, explore, or export the more than 5,000 papers listed so far, or any subset of them. Astrobiology thrives on connections across fields and SciX makes those links between papers, funding sources, missions, and people visible, helping researchers quickly find relevant work, see how ideas connect, and spot new opportunities to collaborate. SciX for Scientists by Scientists: Because SciX staff primarily come from the disciplines they serve and include active researchers, SciX operations and development follow open science principles. Our models and, with the permission of copyright holders, data sets are freely available. Reference: Wilkinson, M. D., et al (2016) “The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship” Scientific Data, Volume 3, id. 160018. https://scixplorer.org/abs/2016NatSD...360018W/abstract
Bartlett et al. (Tue,) studied this question.