CO-OPERAS Activities

CO-OPERAS Activities

Work done so far: Listening to the community

In 2019–2020 CO-OPERAS gathered more than 70 researchers from 32 different disciplines in the SSH in five workshops: four national: in Italy, Portugal, Germany and France; one international in Brussels.

The first question that was addressed was “What are data in the Humanities?” which resulted in an inspirational series of definitions.

Researchers were then asked to assess the current FAIRness of the data they use and the data they produce. Interoperability came out as the most difficult to achieve, due to lack of metadata standards and ontologies.

Reports from the workshops will be published in the CO-OPERAS community on Zenodo, and they were presented at the Berlin 2020 Open Science conference.

What’s going on?

After its series of workshops throughout Europe, CO-OPERAS was able to define specific objectives to achieve:

• Literature review on data definition within the social sciences and humanities (SSH) field;
• Identification of standards used by the SSH communities;
• Feasibility study and launch of a journal on FAIR SSH tools and use cases;
• Online toolkit for publishing platforms FAIRification;
• Survey of SSH needs, challenges, and practices regarding FAIRification.

These objectives are in line with the current work conducted within GoFAIR around the definition of FAIR Implementation Profiles, i.e. the formalization of FAIRification processes specific to communities that can help to identify potential convergences. CO-OPERAS objectives will also help the community to contribute whenever possible to the other main activities of GoFAIR: prototyping FAIR Digital Objects, establishment of FAIR metrics.

CO-OPERAS and OPERAS joint activities

CO-OPERAS activity is also supported by the implementation of OPERAS projects, TRIPLE and OPERAS-P.

TRIPLE is the OPERAS Discovery platform and relies on various FAIR implementations, especially:

• Open Access contents with clear licensing information;
• extended use of persistent identifiers;
• rich and standard metadata;
• automated enrichments in nine languages;
• single access to data from many sources; 
• use of open and free access protocols.

CO-OPERAS members are involved in the TRIPLE project, helping to build it as a FAIR framework for the largest SSH community.

Within OPERAS RI, CO-OPERAS contributes directly to the works of the Special Interest Group on Common standards. The SIG is intended to be the place where to bring the inputs from the CO-OPERAS network, and feed the network back with the suggestions coming from the OPERAS community.