Open access Publication in the European Research Area for Social Sciences and Humanities (OPERAS)
ThemesOpen access Publication in the European Research Area for Social Sciences and Humanities (OPERAS)
What is this about?
Open access Publication in the European Research Area for Social Sciences and Humanities (OPERAS) is a European research infrastructure for the development of open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities (SSH).[1] This platform addresses the challenges in open access publishing[2] and aims to provide “a pan-European infrastructure” for open communication of SSH scholars.[1]
Why is this important?
Publishers and service providers for SSH disciplines, such as research institutions or libraries, publish and disseminate research findings on numerous platforms that differ in technical infrastructure, business model, scope, size, language and specialisms.[1] This fragmented publishing ecosystem of the SSH disciplines, which has led to a lack of common standards, impacts the quality of outputs.[2]
With regard to that, OPERAS objective is to coordinate these publishers and service providers[2] and integrate the European SSH scholarly communication[1] into a wider research infrastructure within the European Research Area (ERA).[2] By finding, accessing, creating, editing, disseminating and validating SSH outputs it aims to fill the gap in European the research community.[2][1][3]Therefore, OPERAS will offer web of services that covers “the entire research lifecycle”.[1]
Led by two French infrastructures, OPERAS is “fully European” and has 43 members from 16 countries. Its Core Members are scholars and institutions from France, UK, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Greece, Croatia, Slovenia and Portugal.[4] Its partners are national institutions, universities, research institutions, non-for-profit organizations as well as for-profit organizations.[1]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Mounier P. ‘Publication favela’ or bibliodiversity? Open access publishing viewed from a European perspective. Learn Publ. 2018;31:299-305.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Giglia E. OPERAS: bringing the long tail of Social Sciences and Humanities into Open Science. JLIS.it. 2019;10(1):140-156.
- ↑ OPERAS Definition and Mission. [cited 2020 Nov 12]. Available from: https://www.operas.unito.it/about/.
- ↑ OPERAS in a Nutshell. [cited 2020 Nov 12]. Available from: https://www.operas.unito.it/about/operas-in-a-nutshell/.
For whom is this important?
What are the best practices?
OPERAS offers several services that are currently at different stages of development:
-Certification service, based on the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB). It provides an international list of SSH open access publications that meet minimal quality criteria regarding peer-reviewing and licensing.[1]
-Metrics service, developed by one of the OPERAS projects HIRMEOS. This service aims to collect the usage and impact metrics related to Open Access monographs from different sources and enable their access, display and analysis.
-Publishing service portal, designed to provide users with a single access to the publishing and scholarly communication services of OPERAS members.
-Discovery service, based on the existing French ISIDORE platform which will enable European researchers in SSH to discover open resources such as data, publications and other materials important to their research that are currently dispersed across local repositories. This service will also enable discovery of these sources in different languages.
-Research for Society, designed to be an interactive platform that would link SSH researchers with society on the hypotheses.org, the largest academic platform in the world with more than 2000 blogs. This service will facilitate collaboration between researchers and socioeconomic actors on research projects.[1]
OPERAS will offer also some Future Services, such as a platform to support translation, a single access point to book reviews, a support service to publishing tools, etc.
Natalie Evans, Andrijana Perković Paloš contributed to this theme. Latest contribution was Oct 19, 2021
