News & Tutorials

Welcome to our blog featuring news, tutorials, and insights about using BigQuery for open scholarly data analysis.

 

ORION-DBs starts FORCE11 working group

Join the public webinar on Sept 4 2026 15:00-16:15 CEST
news
FORCE11
working group
public webinar

With ORION-DBs, a growing set of actors are hosting large research information datasets in shared spaces, notably in Google BigQuery.

To coordinate amongst current and future contributors and work towards community standards for discovery, processing, preservation and documentation, we are starting a FORCE11 working group.

The working group will also seek to build a community around future alternatives to proprietary cloud systems for data sharing at scale and identify future paths to community-led training and development resources.

Aug 4, 2026
Bianca Kramer
 

Alternatives for what?

Public infrastructure alternatives to Google Big Query - an overview of features
news
google big query
alternatives
public infrastructure

There are emerging alternatives to Google Big Query in the cloud and for local computing, and organisations exploring these alternatives or interested in doing so. With ORION-DBs, we hope to spur on these developments and their application for opening up use of scholarly data sets. As a first contribution, in this blog post we discuss some features, or lack thereof, of Google Big Query infrastructure, what they mean for how data are made available and how public infrastructure could strive to emulate or improve these features.

Jul 6, 2026
Bianca Kramer, Cameron Neylon
 

The power of data snapshots - how to make your data work for others

Data snapshot requirements for ORION-DBs
news
data snapshots
requirements
guidelines

If you maintain a data set of open scholarly metadata (e.g. through APIs or full data snapshots) and would like us to consider including your data set in Google Big Query as part of the ORION-DBs collection, this posts outlines the requirements we set out regarding data provision. These include licensing, the availability of a complete data schema, information on versioning and data provenance, and preferred data formats.

Jul 5, 2026
Bianca Kramer, Cameron Neylon

Crosswalking ORION resources to measure open access to biomedical research literature

The role of transformative agreements for NIH- and EC-funded research
tutorial
open access
transformative agreements
funder info

This tutorial shows how to combine various ORION resources, with a focus on funder and open access. Using the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the European Commission (EC) as examples, it draws on data from PubMed, OpenAIRE, OpenAlex, and transformative agreement data from cOAlition S and ESAC. The analysis covers more than 800,000 biomedical research articles, revealing notable differences in open access funding between NIH- and EC-supported research.

Mar 13, 2026
Najko Jahn, Bianca Kramer, Cameron Neylon, Nick Haupka

Sharing the load: Building an open research information collective

news

Can we share resources and burdens to make available key open research information resources in actionable and connectable form in the cloud? Through sharing processes and systems, is it possible, over time, to build a standard for how these data sources should be made available?

Feb 16, 2026
Cameron Neylon, Bianca Kramer, Alysson Fernandes Mazoni, Rodrigo Costas, Najko Jahn, Nees Jan van Eck
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