A Requirements Engineering Framework for Digital Ecosystems in Research and Education to Enable Open Science

Present-day data-intensive information and communication technology infrastructures enable different software services to make research and education-related digital objects from different domains accessible, reusable, findable, to ensure transparency and turn knowledge into value - supporting the open science movement. However, existing information and communication technology infrastructures are not fully integrated and the relevant stakeholders do not thoroughly benefit of their core software services. Moreover, the fields of research data infrastructures, digital education ecosystems, and open science are mostly expanding independently, without a clear collaborative vision, and requirements engineering approaches to tackle the challenges associated with the information and communication technology infrastructures for open science with a long-term rational are missing. This work addresses this gap. The aim of this article is to present the work towards the design of a requirements engineering framework for architecting the information and communication technology infrastructure of the digital ecosystems in research and education enabling open science. The research methodology towards attaining this goal follows a design-science approach. This work advocates for an evolutionary and multidisciplinary perspective.