About
OPERAS-P supports the OPERAS Research Infrastructure by furthering the development of the infrastructure in view of achieving the necessary scientific, technical and community maturity.
To achieve OPERAS’ strategic goals, the key objectives of the OPERAS-P project are the following:
- Produce the necessary documentation defining OPERAS’ strategy and implementation to support the ESFRI application.
- Support the preparation phase of the infrastructure by implementing a legal framework, a governance and support the implementation and coordination of services.
- Prepare a long-term, evidence-based strategy for the development of the infrastructure and its services
- Ensure outreach and advocacy for open scholarly communication in SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES, developing a communication strategy on the infrastructure and supporting the expansion of the consortium, and enhancing innovation for the future of scholarly communication practices in SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES.
Duration: July 2019 – June 2021 (24 months)
Funding: OPERAS-P is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 871069.
Project information on CORDIS: OPERAS-P
Development of services
Beyond setting up OPERAS based on the state-of-art and development plan defined in the Design Study, OPERAS-P dedicates work to develop and integrate innovative services supporting scholarly communication practices.
OPERAS certification service
WP5 will be dedicated to the redevelopment of the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) as a central service for OPERAS. Defined as the first of the three central services of OPERAS, the DOAB, operated by OAPEN, aims at ensuring discoverability of open access books and delivering global certification for research funders and libraries. DOAB has been selected by OPERAS Core Group to be integrated and supported first because of its high level of uptake in terms of usage and its critical position for SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES researchers, particularly in the context of Plan S and the global shift towards Open Science in Europe. As part of WP5, this platform will be redeveloped into an open source platform on D-space technology. In addition, DOAB and the OAPEN Library will be integrated into one technical solution.
OPERAS catalog of services
Due to the fragmentation of services and tools, SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES researchers in Europe struggle to define and implement their communication strategy in a complexifying landscape where publishers, platforms, infrastructures and other service providers are uncoordinated. Building on the coordination work OPERAS RI has been doing for three years, OPERAS-P project will implement a common access point to the services offered by its members. This common access point will consist in a web portal modeling the dynamics of scholarly communication in SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES, listing the relevant services provided by the OPERAS infrastructure nodes to help researchers in their selection of an appropriate publishing venue, and helping them defining a scholarly communication strategy. Browsing the portal, researchers will be addressed to the parties who offer services and policies consistent with their needs, comparing autonomously the different options. The database will be built referring to the most advanced international standards, thus contributing to the dissemination of existing best practices, improving the quality of publishing procedures and helping dissemination and communication of research results. This action will have a double effect: it will clarify the open scholarly communication landscape for SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES European researchers and it will provide the first layer to OPERAS RI to build its catalog of services.
OPERAS check-in
To support a transparent and seamlessly access to the OPERAS platforms and to external sources of data, including services, compute and storage, the project will enable the EGI AAI Check-In (also called EGI AAI proxy) to be adopted as authentication and authorization service within the OPERAS RI. The service provides an identity and access management solution that facilitates the access to services and resources using the federated authentication mechanisms. Through the EGI AAI proxy, users will be able to authenticate with the credentials provided by the IdP of their Home Organisation (e.g. via eduGAIN), as well as using social identity providers, or other selected external identity providers.
OPERAS XML toolbox
The adoption of XML content structuration format, that could unleash the full potential of open access publications and allow for the development of more efficient scientific information services based on TDM, is currently pretty low in all disciplines. In SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES, the community has to overcome a specific obstacle which is the juxtaposition of two standards: XML JATS, adopted by the academic publishing industry, particularly in STEM and for journals (JATS stands for Journal Article Tag Suite), and XML TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) adopted by the humanities research community for books and digital editions. T4.3, will provide tools to achieve interoperability between the standards already used by researchers and service providers: XML-TEI and JATS. This work will enable best publication practices within the publishing community, fitting with researchers needs.
Innovative models and practices
The project will also work on social innovation through WP6 Innovation, focusing on the innovative practices and models emerging in the field of open scholarly communication. This work will focus on aspects already identified in the OPERAS White Papers to ensure a constant and better understanding of the evolution of the environment, and to inform strategic choices in the future of the infrastructure. The innovation on practices will be implemented as a multi-level endeavor.
New models of governance for OPERAS RI
The current models of governance implemented by RIs are inherited from traditional organization models to ensure efficiency and reliability. OPERAS effort to achieve the same must be balanced by a capacity to be open to new models of governance that emerge from the digital environment and the rising needs of players to cooperate on the basis of personal autonomy, flexibility and opportunity, rather than exclusively on hierarchy and rational-bureaucratic formalism. The aim of this task is to deliver a state of the art and critical review on modes of governance in distributed organisations and in the digital area, a field study of innovative governances in chosen public and private organisations, and a synthesis. This work will also enable to review the application of emerging concepts (technical democracy, participatory democracy), participation and online decision-making tools (wiki, blockchain, e-voting, etc.) to OPERAS, and particularly to the governance of the community of members that is likely to be large and diverse in the future. This task will provide to OPERAS coordination team and Core Group conceptual tools to manage smoothly the wide diversity of cultural backgrounds, expertise, level of commitment within its community, which is typical of SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES communities.
Innovative business models for OPERAS members
A task in WP6, led by Open Book Publishers, will tackle Innovative Business models in publishing. It is broadly recognised that the existing business and distribution models for academic book publishing are severely challenged by innovations within Open Access (OA) publishing. In addition, the solution to such challenges adopted by many commercial publishers of charging authors high book processing charges is not viable, at scale, within HSS disciplines. Over recent years we have seen the emergence within OA publishing of a number of innovative funding models (often based around collective funding through consortia of libraries or universities) and publishing business models (most usually with the emergence of new, born-OA, University Presses and scholar-led publishers). In coordination with COPIM (Community-led Open Publishing Infrastructures for Monographs), OBP will analyse the emergence of innovative funding models within OA publishing and publishing business models, to ensure the specific needs and objectives of stakeholders based ERA are fully integrated into the development of the OPERAS RI. This work will enable groundwork to enable innovative revenue and integrated solutions in future projects.
Data FAIRification
The SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES community will be gathered to analyze and find tools to properly implement FAIR principles in the specific context of SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES, in the long-term perspective of integrating SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES data – focussing on scholarly communication products – into the European Open Science Cloud as FAIR data are the building blocks of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). Any discipline implements the FAIR principles according to the specific nature and kind of the data produced in each field. Social Sciences and mostly Humanities deals with a wide range of broadly defined data – going from manuscripts to pictures to photos of an archaeology campaign; all the more so, even publications are data, as the long argument is the researcher’s workbench in the Humanities. The community is somehow far from aware about the EOSC, FAIR data principles and their implementation. Therefore an important and creative effort is needed to engage the community, to define what FAIR means for the discipline and how it can be achieved, with the ultimate goal to bring SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES into EOSC. These are the objective of CO-OPERAS Implementation Network that has been created in 2019 and that will be supported in its development by OPERAS-P project.
BibliodiversityThis aspect will analyse challenges and innovative models related to multilingualism within bibliodiversity in SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES. The role of language in research practices tends to be considered secondary in STEM disciplines, since there seems to be a tacit assumption that English is widely accepted as the language of communication. Besides, it tends to be promoted in (inter)national and European research and innovation policies – mainly written in English and with no or scarce reference to language use or multilingualism. In this context, SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES specific needs regarding scholarly communication in native languages has to be addressed: in those disciplines where language and concepts are very often not only means of communication but objects of research itself, the use of mother tongue is indispensable for in-depth understanding, and knowledge co-creation and sharing. In this setting, the challenge of multilingualism should lay on the concept of ‘bibliodiversity’, coined by the International Alliance of Independent Publishers, which refers to “cultural diversity applied to the world of books”; thereof, underlining the need to encompass a diversity of languages, scientific areas, publication formats, and actors. There are firm grounds to state that bibliodiversity, through multilingual publishing, is an efficient way of protecting national languages and enhancing different academic rhetorical traditions, by reaching specialists and wider audiences in a complementary way. Thereof, it is of the utmost relevance to understand how bibliodiversity, in its manifold formats and multilingual forms, is promoted through innovative practices and high-level programmatic involvement.
Future of scholarly writing
A task will explore the current writing practices in SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES and thus inform future OPERAS activities on researchers needs regarding the publishing technologies and both ongoing and upcoming transformations of the scholarly communication. Focusing on writing practices of researchers in SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES in the digital age – this sustained and unproductive conflation between form and function has been greatly complicated in the digital age, when social acceptance of certain platforms and argumentation modes have become more common in general discourse, while still viewed with suspicion in the academy. Furthermore, the methodologies opened up to humanities and arts researchers by technology are leading to hybrid outputs in which significant aspects of the argumentation are expressed as objects other than text – as a knowledge organisation framework, an interface, as mark-up, or as code. These may not look like sustained arguments as we know them, and may present significant barriers to accessing balanced and informed peer review for such objects, but at the end of the day they are arguments, as Van Zundert, Antonjevic have argued. These innovations are one of the keys to keeping arts and humanities research vibrant and integrated in what we expect to be an increasingly problem- or mission- based, interdisciplinary research culture in Europe, and yet the systems we promote to share and validate science are acting as barriers, rather than filters.
Quality assessment of innovative research
Led by DARIAH, this will analyse quality assessment of novel research and innovative publications in the Arts and Humanities/DH research. This task will seek to inform future innovation in the peer review. It will undertake to differentiate forms from functions of how good scholarship is perceived and valorised through desk research, followed by surveys/interviews/workshops as well as exploring synergies with networks such as ENRESOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES and PEERE. The ability of any research community to assess the quality of the outputs produced within it is a key function, but one that has suffered great disruptions for arts and humanities in recent decades. This trend predates the digital turn: talk began already in the early 2000s about a ‘crisis in scholarly publishing’ driven by competing requirements between the role of the publishers as managers of a peer review process and of their place as controllers of the distribution networks (cf. Greenblatt). This tension has only increased against the backdrop of digital distribution and the move toward open access, but a further layer of complexity has been added by the proliferation of new forms of scholarly output in the arts and humanities, from Twitter feeds to software code to multimedia.
List of Work Packages (WP)
WP Number | WP Title | Lead Beneficiary |
WP1 | Project management and technical coordination | CNRS (OpenEdition) |
WP2 | Support to ESFRI application | CNRS (OpenEdition) |
WP3 | Support to OPERAS Research Infrastructure | CNRS (Huma-Num) |
WP4 | Transnational access to OPERAS services | EKT |
WP5 | Redevelopment of DOAB as central service | OAPEN |
WP6 | Innovation in and for OPERAS | IBL PAN |
WP7 | Communication, Outreach and Advocacy | MWS |
Partners
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS – OpenEdition, Huma Num)
OpenEdition offers the academic community 4 international-scale publication and information platforms in the SSH since 1999: OpenEdition Journals, OpenEdition Books, Calenda, and Hypotheses. These 4 complementary platforms operate as an international electronic publishing framework for academic research and communications. OpenEdition is an infrastructure promoting Open Access academic electronic publishing, while respecting the publications’ own economic balance. OpenEdition guarantees editorial autonomy and offers perspectives for innovation adapted to digital media. OpenEdition has been recognized as national research infrastructure in 2016 and is developed by OpenEditon Center, a service and a research unit (USR 2004) of the CNRS, Aix-Marseille University, the EHESS and the University of Avignon. For more information visit: openedition.org
Huma-Num is a Very Large Facility which aims to facilitate the digital turn in the SSH. To perform this mission, Huma-Num is built on an original organisation. It organises a collective dialogue with communities via consortia accredited by Huma-Num and provides a technological infrastructure on a national and European scale based on a vast network of partners and operators. Through consortia of actors in scientific communities, Huma-Num favors the coordination of the collective production of corpora of sources (scientific recommendations, technological best practices). It also provides research teams in the Human and Social sciences with a range of utilities to facilitate the processing, access, storage and interoperability of various types of digital data. This set of shared services comprises the provision of a Grid of services, a platform for the unified access to data (ISIDORE) and long-term archival facilities. For more information visit: huma-num.fr
DARIAH ERIC
DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) is a European research infrastructure supported jointly by a consortium of 18 member countries. Its mission is to empower research communities in the arts and humanities with digital methods to create, connect and share knowledge about culture and society. DARIAH’s work focuses on building a humanities-friendly component of the European Open Science Cloud for tools, services and data; developing and sustaining training materials and resources in Digital Humanities; enabling and encouraging interdisciplinary research around emergent research themes; advocating for humanities researchers in European policy fora.
The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics is an academic not-for-profit organization whose mission is to lead and coordinate the field of bioinformatics in Switzerland. Its data science experts join forces to advance biological and medical research and enhance health. SIB provides the national and international life science community with a state-of-the-art bioinformatics infrastructure, including services, resources, expertise; and federates world-class researchers and delivers training in bioinformatics. The institute includes some 70 world-class research and service groups including 800 scientists in the fields of genomics, proteomics, evolution and phylogeny, systems biology, structural biology, text mining and machine learning and personalized health. Digital Humanities + is a group member of SIB focused on Digital Humanities. The SIB has become a DARIAH cooperating partner in November 2018 and welcomes DH research projects since 2015, and through the internal group DH+ since October 2018. DH+ develops projects like the SNSF funds HumaReC and MARK16, or a new digital publishing model in partnership with Brill, the webbook. The partnership with DARIAH has been present since the first DH projects at the SIB, with notably the Erasmus+ #dariahTeach, the Open Education workshop grant, the H2020 DESIR and the H2020 OPERAS-P project. DH+ is eager to work with the OPERAS community.
EGI
EGI is a federated e-Infrastructure set up to provide advanced computing services for research and innovation. The EGI e-infrastructure is publicly-funded and comprises hundreds of data centres and cloud providers spread across Europe and worldwide.
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (UGOE)
Göttingen State and University Library (SUB) is one of the largest libraries in Germany and a leader in the development of digital libraries. UGOE is one of the leading open access institutions and e-Infrastructure innovators in Germany and internationally. UGOE establishes dedicated research environments for the humanities in national, European and ESFRI activities; notably, it held the management (together with France) and technical coordination (together with Austria) within the construction phase of the ESFRI project DARIAH, resulting in the ERIC DARIAH-EU. These and other projects address organizational and technical aspects such as virtual research environments and research infrastructures for scientific data (e-Research), research data management, data curation and long-term preservation (e.g. PERICLES, German Federation for the Curation of Biological Data). Via the University press, UGOE is either associated or networked to publishing associations such as AEUP, OASPA, OAPEN library, the working group of German-speaking university presses and the US-based Library Publishing Coalition. For more information visit: uni-goettingen.de
Instytut Badan Literackich Polskiej Akademii Nauk (IBL PAN)
IBL PAN is a highly recognized literary and cultural studies centre in Poland. Founded in 1948, the Institute focuses on literary and cultural studies in a comparative context, as well as on literary theory. IBL PAN is a leading national centre for documentation, bibliography and scholarly editions of Polish literature, as well as an early adopter of digital methods in the humanities. It was ranked in the ‘Excellent’ category (A+) in two most recent national evaluations of research institutions (2013 & 2017). In 2016 the European Commission awarded the Institute with the certificate of ‘HR Excellence in research’. The Institute currently employs approximately 100 researchers and is a doctoral-level teaching centre.For more information visit: ibl.waw.pl
Lexis Compagnia Editoriale
Lexis Compagnia Editoriale in Torino is an Italian company active since 1988, providing advanced publishing services to a variety of private and public customers, with a focus on digital technologies and processes. In recent years it took over the direct management of academic and non-fiction brands (Rosenberg & Sellier, Celid, Accademia University Press, Kermes), adopting and/or experimenting open access policies in its publishing projects. It is partner in Italy of OpenEdition. For more information visit: www.lexis.srl
Max Weber Stiftung – Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland (MWS)
MWS is one of the leading agencies supporting German research in the humanities abroad. It is a legal entity closely linked to the German Federal Government located in Bonn. It comprises 10 humanities research institutes around the world, which provide a bridge function between the host nations and Germany and play an important role in the international science scene. Being a multi-polar network, the institutes collaborate in the promotion of the internationalization of science. The foundation’s goal is to promote research with a focus on history, culture, economic and social sciences in selected countries and a mutual understanding between Germany and the host countries. For more information visit: maxweberstiftung.de.
National Documentation Centre (EKT)
EKT was founded in 1980. EKT acts as the backbone for the Greek national infrastructure for the development, organization and provision of science and technology content, offering services to the country’s scientific and business community. EKT’s e-infrastructures for research pay a particular focus to the needs of SSH researchers through the development of services like the ePublishing platform and the Greek Reference Index for the SSH. EKT is also actively involved in the promotion and support of open access and open science policies and related infrastructures. For more information visit: ekt.gr.
OAPEN
OAPEN is dedicated to open access to scholarly monographs. The foundation operates 2 platforms: the OAPEN Library, a platform for hosting, dissemination and preservation of open access books, and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), a discovery service for Open Access books. OAPEN was launched in 2008 as a 30-month targeted project co-funded by the EU in its eContentplus-program. The project was conducted by University Presses from 6 countries, coordinated in the Netherlands by Amsterdam University Press (AUP) and supported by the University of Amsterdam (Uva) and the University of Leiden (UL). The project was continued in 2011 as the OAPEN Foundation, founded by AUP, UL, University Library of Utrecht University (UU), Netherlands Academy of Sciences (KNAW), National Library of the Netherlands (KB) and AUP. These institutes act as Participants in the foundation. The Foundation received financial support from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Support from above mentioned participants and NWO was renewed in 2014. For more information visit: oapen.org
X-officio
X-officio specialises in legal and governance aspects of research infrastructures, ERICs, research facilities and laboratories used by the science community to conduct research and foster innovation. X-officio supports research infrastructures on all matters pertaining to legal, governance and procurement in their design, implementation (construction) and operation phases. It also assists research infrastructures in identifying the most appropriate legal entity for their needs and provides support on contractual matters.
Open Book Publishers (OBP)
Open Book Publishers’ books are published in hardback, paperback, pdf and ebook editions, but they also include a free online edition that can be read via their website, downloaded, reused or embedded anywhere. Their free online books are currently being accessed by thousands of readers each month in over 207 countries. In addition, their digital publishing model allows them to extend their books well beyond the printed page. They are creating interactive books, and works that incorporate moving images, links and sound into the fabric of the text. More traditional titles are equipped with digital resources freely available on their website, including extra chapters, reviews, links and image galleries — these can be found on the individual product page for each book. For more information visit: openbookpublishers.com
Sveuciliste u Zadru
For more than a decade the Department of Information Sciences at the University of Zadar is very active in promoting the idea of free and unrestricted access to research results and academic works. Our staff members are involved in a number of national infrastructural projects like HRCAK (Portal of Croatian scientific journals) and CROSBI (Crotian scientific bibliography), their international projects and initiatives like in OpenAIRE, an EC-funded initiative with 50 partners which aims to support the Open Access policy of the European Commission via a technical infrastructure, and TD COST Action TD1306 New Frontiers of Peer Review (PEERE). The University of Zadar encourages its academics to publish their research in open access. All journals published by different University departments are freely available on the web. The University Library has established an institutional repository on the national digital archive and repository DABAR and in the meantime offers advice and support for students, teachers and researchers in helping them publish their works under free access conditions. For more information visit: unizd.hr/cimmar/InvolvedDepartments/DepartmentofInformationSciences
Universidade de Coimbra
UC Digitalis is a global project of the University of Coimbra for the collection, valuation and dissemination of digital contents. It aims to place knowledge transfer dynamics at the service of economic, social and cultural development, thereby intensifying the University’s links with the community at national and international level. It is particularly distinctive of UC Digitalis that it is designed to promote and boost the editorial status of the science produced in the Portuguese-speaking world. It hosts the digital libraries ALMA MATER, POMBALINA and IMPACTUM, comprising almost 25,000 documents (mainly books, book chapters and articles). For more information visit: digitalis.uc.pt
Università degli Studi di Torino
UniTo is one of the most ancient and prestigious Italian Universities. Hosting about 70.000 students, 4.000 academic and technical staff, 800 post-doctoral students, it promotes culture and produces research, innovation, training and employment. It is today one of the largest Italian universities, open to international research, projects and training. It has been at the forefront in Open Access projects, enacting in 2013 its Open Access policy, among the first universities in Italy. The university runs an Institutional Repository (AperTO), a publishing platform (SIRIO@UniTO) for Open Access journals and a webspace for public engagement (FRIDA). For more information visit: unito.it
Università deglis Studi di Milano-Bicocca
The University of Milano-Bicocca (https://www.unimib.it/unimib-international/about-us) is a state university established in 1998. In the 2019 Times Higher Education Ranking dedicated to the top 350 universities under 50 years old, the University ranked 82th in the world, fifth in Italy. It participates and collaborates in several Research Infrastructures such as BBMRI-ERIC, EATRIS-ERIC, ESS-ERIC, EuroBioimaging-ERIC, Elixir, ISBE, LW-ITA, COIRICH, ISIS, DTT, STAR. Since 2017, the University of Milano-Bicocca runs the Executive Master in Management of Research Infrastructures (https://emmri.unimib.it/home-2/) educating each year highly experienced leaders of National and pan-European Research Infrastructures.
Université du Luxembourg
Multilingual, international and research-oriented, the University of Luxembourg was founded in 2003 and is the only public university of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. The C2DH (Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History) is an interdisciplinary centre at the University of Luxembourg. It works on issues related to contemporary history, digital history and public history. The Centre is inspired by the concept of “thinkering”, aiming at promoting a hands-on approach to new digital sources, tools and infrastructures in doing history.
Deliverables
D1.1 Collaborative web platform (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3635284)
D1.2 Data Management Plan (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3635300)
D7.1 Communication and Dissemination Guide (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3635306)
D7.2 OPERAS-P Portal created (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3635312)
Background and the OPERAS Research Infrastructure
OPERAS’ concept was born out of the need to improve cooperation between players in the social sciences and humanities scholarly communication landscape, enhancing the overall quality of the ecosystem and taking care of the whole research cycle in view of enabling Open Science as a standard practice. Scholarly communication is indeed not separated from the research process but is integrated with it as a continuous communication practice that is affected by each stage of the research lifecycle.
Specialist scholarly monographs constitute the core research output of the humanities and social sciences, together with other formats such as scholarly editions, articles, edited books. Their specificity is based on the complementarity between the medium and the content: they constitute a suitable medium to shape ideas and set out arguments allowing to deepen and feed the evidence emerging from it. As such, monographs constitute a vital and unique way of furthering scientific evaluation of research results. Therefore ensuring their integration into the digital landscape of scholarship is vital for the future of these disciplines, and their impact on science and society.
Thus, the OPERAS research infrastructure was created to address those issues in a comprehensive manner, aiming to improve the accessibility and dissemination of publications in the SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES through a single access point; to provide joint services; to coordinate activities of strategic actors and stakeholders (research institutions, libraries, platforms, publishers, funders) in their transition to open science, and in particular open scholarly communication; to develop common good practice standards for digital open access publishing, infrastructures, services, editorial qualities, business models and funding streams, and explore alternative measurements of impact in the SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES; offer sustained training, embodying common standards, to researchers on all of the above.
The early development of OPERAS was carried out in two H2020 projects: HIRMEOS and OPERAS-D. HIRMEOS, still in progress, aims at upgrading five publishing platforms for the open access monographs by enhancing their technical capacities and services and rendering their content and technology interoperable. OPERAS-D was a design project addressing the long-term requirements for developing OPERAS. It allowed OPERAS to produce a comprehensive Design Study defining business and governance models, scientific and technical concepts for future services and establishing a roadmap for its future development. The infrastructure submitted its first application for the ESFRI 2018 roadmap. As a result of it, ESFRI identified open scholarly communication in Social Sciences and Humanities as a High Potential Strategic Area, requiring OPERAS to improve its maturity for future application to ESFRI roadmap.
Whereas those two projects and this body of work helped to design the OPERAS infrastructure, relying on the OPERAS-D Design Study, OPERAS-P supports further preparation of OPERAS and its new ESFRI application. The preparation of infrastructure will entail implementing a network of services supporting publishers and researchers needs, supporting outreach, and supporting advocacy and innovation in the open scholarly communication ecosystem. The concurrent establishment of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) widens the operational framework of OPERAS, which actively seeks connections between its infrastructure and EOSC challenges.