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Scientific Case Main Findings

SCIENTIFIC CASE MAIN FINDINGS

Download the full OPERAS Design Study here: OPERAS Design Study

doi: 10.5281/zenodo.1009544

The vision of Open Science is premised on a paradigmatic shift in research practices and scholarly communication. In its multidisciplinary scope, with a focus on social sciences and humanities (SSH), OPERAS addresses those disciplines that are particularly in need of a major initiative to perform the transformation towards Open Science and evolve their innovative potential1. The challenges facing scholarly communication in the SSH have been well documented in various studies and academic conferences in recent years2.

SCIENCE AS COMMUNICATION

The traditional approach for the representation of scholarly communication, which separates publication from research and considers publications as a subsequent output and manifestation, is based on a flawed communication model. This misinterpretation affects the approach of open access as it entails the implementation of global models that are detached from the reality of research as a communication practice. For a long time, several researchers, such as Latour and Woolgar3, Garvey4, Galison5 and more recently Nielsen6 have evidenced on the contrary how science should be literally conceived as a communication practice. Furthermore, as a social activity involving a wide range of interactions, the continuous model of communication in scholarship7 requires infrastructure to serve as dynamic and interactive networks. The concept of an extensive scholarly record8 including innovative methods and formats demands a framework of fluid but identifiable, distributed but interlinked units9. OPERAS adopts these concepts throughout its full research lifecycle support and the synergies build on the connection of distributed infrastructures, institutions and entities.

THE SPECIFICITY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

SSH scholarly communication practices differ substantially from STM, which has been exposed even more in electronic publishing, culminating in the primary publication format of journal articles in STM versus monographs in the SSH. The monograph format reveals other specificities in terms of episteme, workflow, collaboration, relationship between theory and fieldwork, and elaboration and construction of the argumentation based on evidence in those disciplines10. Academic books are poorly integrated in commercial databases and the format of monographs is often excluded from OA policies, initiatives, and copyright exceptions11. The evaluation of research outputs in areas with very low uptake of bibliometric and scientometric evaluation (such as SSH) is currently a major issue at European level12. In addition, more studies and reports suggest that the scholarly communication ecosystem is currently suboptimal, lacks the transition to Open Science and doesn’t support enough innovation13 while changes are prevented by few commercial players14. OPERAS encounters these barriers in its efforts to strengthen scholarly-led initiatives, publicly funded research institutions and infrastructure service providers, who are developing domain-specific models for scholarly communication and implementing tailor-made services in order to close the gap in the research fields of SSH as an immediate impact while fostering the evolution of open scholarly communication practices in the long run.

SSH research is frequently grounded in specific cultural areas, which implies communication in native languages and not only in English as the scientific lingua franca15. The approaches towards internationalization of the humanities and transregional research has lead to international collaborations and communication networks but has not resulted in few core publication organs as in STM, since national books and articles in the native languages remain dominant, as evidenced by the recent INTERCO-SSH project16. As a result most SSH communication and publication service providers are not working at global level, but rather at national or regional level, leading to the fragmented landscape already described. A connection of the distributed publication and communication infrastructures with the implementation of a multilingual discovery service will provide a direct, beneficial impact on the outreach and internationalization potential of SSH research.

ENGAGEMENT WITH SOCIETY

The impact of SSH research on society has been a rising topic in the academic and the public sector17. While SSH research is fundamental to the production of knowledge, it also contributes to the economic domain, although the centre of its impact lies in the increase of civic capital18. However, SSH clearly has the potential for a more intense engagement with the public19. An adequate framework for open scholarly communication adopting the models for collaboration and participation, as proposed in OPERAS, will serve for different stakeholders including the non-academic sector and citizens. Based on engagement, research and public will be able to collaborate during the research period. While ideas and concepts of innovative scholarly communication have been discussed broadly20, implementations at a larger scale remain a desideratum. Finally, the iterative and discursive process in hermeneutic methods, which have truncated the SSH from developments in the publishing system, as well as the bond to local communities in native languages, which has decelerated the internationalization of the SSH, now hold an immense potential for an inspiring model of Open Science with direct societal impact, based on continuous communication.

OPERAS AND THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES

OPERAS achieves the implementation of Open Science in the SSH community. As such it integrates digital humanities (DH) programmes that aim at renewing research practices in the humanities and social sciences through intensive use of digital technologies21. The diversity of the fields of SSH make it impossible to cover it in its entirety by a single infrastructure. In the humanities, DARIAH focusses on digital methods for analysis and data-centered lifecycles. CLARIN specializes in text and language data and its processing. CESSDA connects the digital archives of the social sciences contributing to a rich data pool at a European level which also includes the European Social Survey and SHARE. The focus on data-driven research of all these ERICs reflects the fundamental importance of open data and digital source material in the SSH as a catalyst for innovative research22. OPERAS cooperates with these consortia on several levels for exchange of knowledge, and connects to the underlying infrastructures for exchange of data, but addresses the gaps from a more general, wider scope through substantial additions to the infrastructure landscape: from digital methods and open data towards digital scholarship and Open Science.

However, the transition to Open Science and the adoption of open innovation principles relies not only on open data sources but also on open communication and participatory processes.23 Thus, in addition to the computer-aided analysis, the sharing of findings through scientific conversation, the quality assurance and review processes, the editing and writing workflows, the tracking and acknowledgement of core research activities, i.e. the ‘scholarly primitives’24, also have to be supported and integrated in the Research Infrastructure landscape.

  1. Crane, Gregory, Alison Babeu, and David Bamman. “eScience and the humanities.” International Journal on Digital Libraries 7.1 (2007): 117–122 [↩]
  2. See landscape study section in OPERAS Design Study [↩]
  3. Latour, Bruno, Steve Woolgar, et Michel Biezunski. La vie de laboratoire. Paris: La Découverte, 2005 [↩]
  4. Garvey, William, D. « Chapter 1 – The Role of Scientific Communication in the Conduct of Research and the Creation of Scientific  Knowledge ». In Communication: the Essence of Science, 1–39. Pergamon, 1979. doi:10.1016/B978-0-08-023344-4.50006-4. [↩]
  5. Galison, Peter. Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. University of Chicago Press, 1997. [↩]
  6. Nielsen, Kristian H. « Scientific Communication and the Nature of Science ». Science & Education 22, nº 9 (1 septembre 2013): 2067–86. doi:10.1007/s11191-012-9475-3 [↩]
  7. Borgman, Christine L. Scholarship in the digital age: Information, infrastructure, and the Internet. MIT press, 2010. See also: Hjartarson et al.: Modelling Collaboration in Digital Humanities Scholarship: Foundational Concepts of an EMiC UA Project Charter, in: Brown, Susan. Cultural Mapping and the Digital Sphere: Place and Space. University of Alberta, 2015. [↩]
  8. Lavoie, Brian, et al. The Evolving Scholarly Record. OCLC Research, Dublin, Ohio, 2014. [↩]
  9. Van de Sompel, Herbert and Carl Lagoze: All Aboard: Toward a Machine-Friendly Scholarly Communication System, in: Hey, Tony et al.: The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery. Microsoft Research, 2009. [↩]
  10. Geoffrey Crossick, Monographs and Open Access, 2015, http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/rereports/year/2015/monographs/. Eve, Martin Paul. Open access and the humanities. Cambridge University Press, 2014. [↩]
  11. For an extensive review of Open Access policies in Europe, see: http://www.pasteur4oa.eu/ [↩]
  12. Ochsner, Michael, Sven E. Hug, et Hans-Dieter Daniel. « Humanities Scholars’ Conceptions of Research Quality ». In Research Assessment in the Humanities, edited by Michael Ochsner, Sven E. Hug, et Hans-Dieter Daniel, 43-69. Springer International Publishing, 2016. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-29016-4_5. [↩]
  13. The Amsterdam Call for Action on Open Science: https://english.eu2016.nl/documents/reports/2016/04/04/amsterdam-call-for-action-on-open-science p. 22–23 [↩]
  14. Larivière  V., Haustein S., Mongeon P. (2015) “The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era”. PLoS ONE 10(6): e0127502. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0127502 [↩]
  15. Barbara Cassin, « Les intraduisibles », Revue Sciences/Lettres [Online], 1 | 2013, http://rsl.revues.org/252; DOI: 10.4000/rsl.252 [↩]
  16. Sivertsen, Gunnar. “Patterns of internationalization and criteria for research assessment in the social sciences and humanities.” Scientometrics 107.2 (2016): 357–368. doi: 10.1007/s11192-016-1845-1 and Johan Heilbron, Thibaud Boncourt, Rafael Schögler, Gisèle Sapiro. European Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) in a Global Context. Preliminary findings from the INTERCO-SSH Project. February 2017 http://interco-ssh.eu/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/European-Social-Science-in-a-Global-Contextv2.pdf [↩]
  17. Benneworth, Paul, Magnus Gulbrandsen, and Ellen Hazelkorn. The impact and future of arts and humanities research. Springer, 2016. [↩]
  18. Assessing the impact of arts and humanities research at the University of Cambridge, Ruth Levitt, Claire Celia, Stephanie Diepeveen, Siobhán Ní Chonaill, Lila Rabinovich, Jan Tiessen, Rand Report, 2010 http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/technical_reports/2010/RAND_TR816.pdf [↩]
  19. Belfiore, Eleonora. ‘“Impact”, “value” and “bad Economics”: Making Sense of the Problem of Value in the Arts and Humanities’. Arts and Humanities in Higher Education 14.1 (2015): 95–110, DOI: 10.1177/1474022214531503. Bate, Jonathan, ed. The public value of the humanities. A&C Black, 2011. [↩]
  20. Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. “Beyond metrics: Community authorization and open peer review.” Debates in the digital humanities (2012): 452–459, http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/7 [↩]
  21. or a comprehensive view on digital humanities, see Schreibman, Susan, Siemens, Ray and Unsworth, John . A New Companion to Digital Humanities. 2 edition. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016. Dacos, Marin. Read/Write Book: Le livre inscriptible. OpenEdition Press, 2010. http://books.openedition.org/oep/128. Mounier, Pierre. Read/Write Book 2: Une introduction aux humanités numériques. OpenEdition Press, 2012. http://books.openedition.org/oep/226. [↩]
  22. “Riding the wave. How Europe can gain from the rising tide of scientific data”. Final report of the High level Expert Group on Scientific  Data. A submission to the European Commission, October 2010, http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/newsroom/cf/document.cfm?action=display&doc_id=707 [↩]
  23. European Commission, ed. Open Innovation, Open Science, Open to the World: A Vision for Europe. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2016, DOI: 10.2777/061652 [↩]
  24. Unsworth, John. “Scholarly Primitives: What Methods Do Humanities Researchers Have in Common, and How Might Our Tools Reflect This?” Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, 2000, http://www.iath.virginia.edu/˜jmu2m/Kings.5-00/primitives.html [↩]