Conference Sessions Details

Session 1: Sustaining OPERAS Research Infrastructure

April 25, 10:30–11:30

Chair: Suzanne Dumouchel

• Yannick Legré: The OPERAS ERIC – Sustaining the OPERAS Research Infrastructure
• Pierre Mounier: Diamond Open Access from the OPERAS Perspective
• Sy Holsinger: OPERAS Service Portfolio: Achievements and the Future
• Karla Avanço: OPERAS Training Strategy: Leading the Way Towards an Empowered Community
• Questions & Answers

Presentations:

Sy Holsinger: OPERAS Service Portfolio: Achievements and the Future

OPERAS offers a comprehensive approach to scholarly communication, supporting the entire cycle of scholarly communication and enabling greater community control over openness and accessibility. OPERAS aggregates, federates, and scales up resources, providing services to increase the overall quality of social sciences and humanities (SSH) research.

The OPERAS service portfolio has grown, and as a result, services were re-grouped into eight categories: Discovery, Analytics, Quality Assurance, Research4Society, Multilingualism, Training, Operational and Collaboration Tools.

The last year was primarily centred around the technical development of our services. We witnessed many services transition between different phases, and we successfully implemented a system to manage and monitor these transitions effectively. Additionally, we established a robust governance structure to ensure smooth operations of our services.

At the start of 2022, there were only 4 services in Beta, with 6 services either in the design phase or earlier. Therefore, it was a busy year from a development perspective. By mid-2023 (the timing of writing), 5 services are now in production, 4 in Beta and only 1 still under design.

This session will give audience members a first hand look at what changes have made, new developments and the future of the OPERAS service portfolio. They will hear first hand from the individuals directly responsible for the individual service, including how the service operates in practice. There will be time for questions and answers to ensure an open dialogue between the speakers and participants.

Karla Avanço: OPERAS Training Strategy: Leading the Way Towards an Empowered Community

OPERAS has been paving the way to guarantee its constant evolution and long term sustainability. To become an ERIC, the infrastructure should meet certain requirements, such as demonstrating scientific excellence, contributing significantly to research and innovation in the scholarly communication area. It should also face some challenges, among them, securing its sustainability and building strong collaborations and partnerships are worth mentioning. In this context, developing a training strategy is one of the steps of such an enterprise.
OPERAS Training Strategy is closely related to OPERAS’ Strategic Plan, which addresses training in two of its core objectives. The first one aims at allowing the European OPERAS community to share a common understanding of the goals pursued in OPERAS regarding Open Science (OS) practices and FAIR principles. It will help build a focused infrastructure serving the needs of the scholarly communication community in the fields of Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). The second objective will allow the communities of service providers and users to ensure streamlined delivery and wide acceptance of the existing and new services that will come out of OPERAS.
To achieve the aforementioned objectives, OPERAS is currently participating in different European Commission-funded projects to carry out some of the specific actions at the European level. However, OPERAS Training strategy can be an instrument in the elaboration of future, well-tailored projects to meet our excellence objectives in the area of scholarly communication. It can as well assist the national nodes to develop their own training strategies focusing at the local spheres.
Finally, having an empowered and knowledgeable community depends strongly on collaboration and knowledge sharing between different partners. The training strategy represents the opportunity to consolidate existing relations and to establish new ones.

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Session 2: Equitable and Diamond Publishing Models

April 25, 11:45–13:15

Chair:

• Céline Barthonnat and Raphaël Tournoy: Episciences, a Platform for Publishing Diamond Open Access Journals
• Jeanette Hatherill, Urooj Nizami and Emma Uhl: Coalition Publica: Collaborating for Equitable Open Access
• Iva Melinščak Zlodi and Jadranka Stojanovski: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Institutional Publishing
• Demmy Verbeke: Are Libraries Blocking Equitable Open Access?
• Questions & Answers

Presentations:

Céline Barthonnat and Raphaël Tournoy: Episciences, a Platform for Publishing Diamond Open Access Journals

Episciences is a platform for publishing diamond open access scientific journals. Created in 2013, it is open to any country and language, with no access or publication charges.

Episciences publishes overlay journals and, for this purpose, leverages open science infrastructures. The content of the publications is hosted on open repositories (such as HAL, arXiv, Zenodo, bioRxiv, medRxiv), Data repositories for datasets and Software Heritage for software. It allows Episciences to benefit from the FAIR principles supported by these infrastructures while also adding value and services. The platform offers a complete publishing solution for researchers who can peer-review and publish articles, datasets and software. All these components may also be linked to each other in order to promote the FAIR principles and the reproducibility of science.

Relying on existing infrastructures allows publishing to be cost-efficient. Academic-led, the platform is supported by French academic funding (Ministry of Higher Education and Research, CNRS, Inria, and INRAE). Episciences also benefit from CCSD, Inria, and Institut Fourier editorial support teams.

Episciences hosts 30 journals from several disciplines, mostly mathematics, informatics, applied mathematics, social sciences, and humanities. More than 6,000 articles or reports have been published, and 12,350 users were involved in the publishing process.

The platform listens to the scientific communities, through scientific epi-committees. The close relationship with the journals’ technical and scientific boards enables us to develop our technical offering and tailor our editorial services to their needs. For example, we are currently working with user communities to improve the interface and accessibility of the websites. We also offer solutions for copy-editing, communication and advice about the best practices in open science publishing.

Episciences is available on the OpenAIRE catalogue of services and on the EOSC marketplace; it’s also open to new projects and collaborations on a European and international scale. Relying on open infrastructures, the overlay model and a dedicated support and editorial team, Episciences increases the transparency of the editorial workflow and allows researchers to regain control of their publishing means and processes.

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Jeanette Hatherill, Urooj Nizami and Emma Uhl: Coalition Publica: Collaborating for Equitable Open Access

Érudit and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), together as Coalition Publica, have been collaborating on supporting the transition to sustainable open access publishing in the Social Sciences and Humanities in Canada by building a non-commercial, open source national infrastructure for digital scholarly publishing, dissemination, and research.

Working in a bilingual national context across teams that span the globe and produce open source software used by over 34,000 journals worldwide, means that at its foundation Coalition Publica has a vested interest in supporting and sustaining a multilingual and bibliodiverse research literature that responds to community needs. Along with a presentation of the Coalition Publica project, this talk will highlight efforts by the Érudit and PKP teams to foster collaborative approaches to achieve common goals of equitable participation in knowledge creation for the public good.

This presentation will highlight initiatives include a new in-kind, fee-free route toward PKP Membership through the Community Contributor Pathway, and updates to the Membership fee structure that enable communities in Low, Lower Middle and Middle Income Countries to be better integrated with the project’s governance. We will also highlight resources and interest groups that foster multilingual development of PKP software and documentation. Finally, we’ll cover how Érudit works with library partners to increase multilingual and French content in the DOAJ and advance the Partnership for Open Access that allows libraries to contribute financially to support the notably independent and non-commercial journals that participate in Coalition Publica.

As a national effort that brings together scholarly journal publishers, university research libraries, and researchers in the social sciences and humanities, Coalition Publica is providing a way for stakeholders in Canada to collaborate to ensure community-driven scholarship thrives in a sustainable open access future.

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Iva Melinščak Zlodi and Jadranka Stojanovski: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Institutional Publishing

The Project DIAMAS – Developing Institutional Open Access Publishing Models to Advance Scholarly Communication was initiated in September 2022 with the ambitious objective of improving and harmonising publishing activities that are taking place within academic institutions, particularly research-performing institutions, higher education institutions, and learned societies. This project places a special focus on open access publishing, with an emphasis on diamond publishers, as well as other entities that offer services to such publishers. Despite institutional publishing having a long-established presence in the European academic landscape, it has received limited comprehensive investigation. Before initiating change in this domain, more detailed knowledge of the variety of stakeholders involved in institutional publishing was necessary.

In spring 2023, a survey was conducted to collect information regarding the general characteristics, policies, and practices of institutional publishing service providers (IPSPs) across Europe. 685 participants from 43 countries provided responses to questions grouped in seven key aspects of publishing.

We will present the main findings of different categories, including a description of the funding model and information in assessing sustainability, information over who controls the publishing and decides on future developments, diversity and speed of uptake of various Open Access or Open Science practices, editorial quality, editorial management and research integrity, technical service efficiency, visibility, including indexation as the most challenging issues for publishers, and equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging (EDIB: multilingualism, gender equity and accessibility issues).

The results of the survey confirmed the assumption that there exists a rich variety and diversity among the actors, the guiding principles of their operations, and their available capacities, resources, knowledge and maturity. The insights gained from the survey will be published in the landscape report titled “Institutional Publishing in the ERA: results from the DIAMAS survey”. They will be presented at the OPERAS conference. These findings will serve as important guidance for the development of future support and capacity enhancement services in the upcoming phases of the DIAMAS project.

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Demmy Verbeke: Are Libraries Blocking Equitable Open Access?

Libraries have long been hailed as agents of democratization, providing access to information for all. Traditionally, university libraries assumed this role in the context of scholarly communication, by providing not only staff and students, but typically also external readers, access to scientific books and journals (sometimes at a modest fee). It is reasonable to expect that university libraries would play an even more central part in realizing unrestricted global access to the scholarly record now that online publishing platforms and open access enable unprecedented possibilities in the dissemination of scientific publications. And yet, we have seen the opposite happen. Libraries typically restrict access to their electronic collections more than to their physical ones. What is more, legacy processes like acquisition and cataloguing are still overwhelmingly organized around publications which appear behind a paywall. As a result, university libraries are relinquishing their traditional role as sources of information for contemporary research, as the results of this research are increasingly (and oftentimes exclusively) shared openly. Finally, the collection budget of libraries is often to some extent repurposed to support open publishing, but the large majority of this money is spent on inequitable approaches to open publishing based on business models focused on author fees and read-and-publish deals which introduce new barriers (albeit it this time for authors rather than readers) and stifle much-needed innovation in academic publishing. This contribution discusses the various ways in which university libraries currently oppose openness and bibliodiversity and what they can do to embrace their traditional mission again by focusing on equitable openness instead.

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Session 3: Research Assessment and Peer Review

April 25, 11:45–13:15

Chair: Niels Stern

• Niels Stern: Evaluating Evaluation Criteria for Open Access Book Publishers – Reporting from an Exploratory Workshop
• Zehra Taskin, Janne Pölönen and Mikael Laakso: Unveiling the Uniqueness: Scholar-Led Publishing as a Catalyst for Diverse Research Assessment SystemsN
• Ronald Snijder: Open Access Books: Shedding Light on Peer Review with PRISM & Extending the OA Books Toolkit
• Elena Giglia: There is more than “Open Peer Review”. On the Positive Effects Open Science Practices Can Have on Peer Review
• Questions & Answers

Presentations:

Niels Stern: Evaluating Evaluation Criteria for Open Access Book Publishers – Reporting from an Exploratory Workshop

Under the auspices of the DOAB Trusted Platform network and the COPIM Open Book Future project representatives of twelve organisations who all deal with evaluation criteria of open book publishers and their peer review practises came together on 18 April to exchange knowledge and share experiences and discuss how to engage the wider community in these discussions.

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Zehra Taskin, Janne Pölönen and Mikael Laakso: Unveiling the Uniqueness: Scholar-Led Publishing as a Catalyst for Diverse Research Assessment Systems

Since the emergence of citation indices in the 1960s, they have become the primary source for research assessments, offering decision-makers a convenient tool. Web of Science, primarily relying on indicators based on publication and citation counts, has been critiqued for predominantly covering journals from developed countries and published in English. Even if citation indices have diversified their content, following the advent of new commercial products like Scopus in the early 2000s, they still collectively represent only a relatively small share of the global scholarly communication ecosystem. Yet, in many countries across the world, citation indices remain the fundamental (and often only) information source for evaluating individuals, institutions, and nations.
The main objective of this study is to compare journals published worldwide with those indexed in the Web of Science and Scopus in terms of various characteristics including:
– Ownership of journals (professional publisher, university, association)
– Publisher countries and regions
– Languages of publication
– Open access
The global journal lists will be obtained using some of the most comprehensive open sources for publication and journal information, matched with the International ISSN Center data.
The primary aim of this study is to underscore the vital importance of journals operated by universities and learned societies in scientific communication and emphasize the necessity for more open, comprehensive, and diverse infrastructures supporting research assessment.

Authors:

Ronald Snijder: Open Access Books: Shedding Light on Peer Review with PRISM & Extending the OA Books Toolkit

OAPEN promotes and supports the transition to open access for academic books, not just by hosting and listing OA books and chapters but also by offering services and providing information.
One of the services provided is PRISM: Peer Review Information Service for Monographs. This allows publishers to describe their peer review process(es) in a structured way and make it available at the level of the publisher and for each individual title. Currently, there are thousands of PRISM records in DOAB; this presentation will discuss the current status, and tries to identify trends. Also, the recently released PRISM-widget will be discussed.
Another service is providing information about open access for books. The OA Books Toolkit has been launched in 2021, aimed at providing helpful support for authors and those who support them, such as librarians. As part of the PALOMERA project, we are expanding the role of the OA Books Toolkit: supporting funders. A major addition is the creation of a Knowledge Base: a database containing source documents and results. The development, current status and future developments of the OA Books Toolkit will be discussed.

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Session 4: Research Assessment and Peer Review

April 25, 14:30–16:00

Chair: Jadranka Stojanovski

• Janne Pölönen: Multilingualism and Language Biases in Research Assessment
• Erzsébet Toth Czifra: A Shared Direction Towards Recognising Diverse Research Outputs, Practices and Activities: an Overview of CoARA’s Position
• Johan Rooryck and Ludo Waltman: Recognizing and Rewarding Peer Review
• Fotis Mystakopoulos: Contextualising Research Assessment for Social Sciences and Humanities: Insights and Challenges from the GraspOS Project Pilot
• Questions & Answers

Presentations:

Janne Pölönen: Multilingualism and Language Biases in Research Assessment

Indented and unintended language biases and priorities in assessment are one of the most important sources of global and socio-economic inequality in science. The consequences affect researchers from all fields – especially social sciences and humanities – and citizens across all countries.

According to the international CoARA Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment (1st core-commitment), “changes in assessment practices should enable recognition of the broad diversity of valuable contributions that researchers make to science and for the benefit of society… irrespective of the language in which they are communicated”.

Recently established CoARA Working-Group on Multilingualism and Language Biases in Research Assessment aims to

1. raise awareness across all fields about the importance of “multilingualism in practice of science, in scientific publications and in academic communications” (UNESCO)

2. provide institutions with guidelines, toolbox and implementation proposal for recognizing, rewarding and incentivizing research carried out and communicated in all languages, and for addressing language biases in metrics, expert-assessment and rankings

This presentation will discuss some of the CoARA WG challenges and potential impacts:

• promoting international excellence in research while ensuring equity, diversity and societal interaction across STEM and SSH fields
• provide equal opportunities to researchers and institutions irrespective of research orientation and mission, or language competencies
• ensuring availability of high-quality, diverse, locally relevant research, knowledge transfer beyond academia and co-creation between researchers and other stakeholders
• implementation of Open Science and RRI policies by fostering inclusive and diverse communities, broadening participation in scientific endeavours, and strengthening democratic culture.

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Erzsébet Toth Czifra: A Shared Direction Towards Recognising Diverse Research Outputs, Practices and Activities: an Overview of CoARA’s Position

In the current research assessment systems worldwide, we see a range of anomalies and conflicts between tenure and promotion criteria and innovative, high-quality research that manifests itself in a diversity of activities and formats. Drawing upon the initiatives such as DORA or the Leiden Manifesto, the Coalition of Reforming Research Assessment (CoARA, https://coara.eu/) sets forth a common path for the reform of research evaluation while upholding organisational autonomy, across Europe and on a global scale. Started in December 2022, CoARA brings together more than 500 (and growing) research-performing organisations, research funders, policy actors and research infrastructures from over 40 countries who join forces to implement the timely reform of research assessment across Europe and beyond. CoARA’s vision is to enable a systemic reform of assessment of research, researchers and research organisations that recognise the diverse outputs, practices and activities that maximise the quality and impact of research.

Signatories of the CoARA Agreement are committed to effecting systemic transformation grounded in 10 shared principles set out in the ‘Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment’ and within an agreed timeframe. Additionally, signatories commit to fostering the exchange of information and mutual learning.

The brief presentation provides an overview of activities and milestones achieved during the first year of CoARA and outlines a diversity of pathways through which interested parties could engage with CoARA.

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Johan Rooryck and Ludo Waltman: Recognizing and Rewarding Peer Review

In mid-2023, the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) launched a number of working groups in which CoARA members are working together to address key issues in the reform of research assessment. One of these working groups focuses on improving the way peer review activities are recognized and rewarded in research assessments. The lack of recognition for peer review activities is often seen as a major obstacle discouraging researchers to perform peer review and ultimately putting the sustainability of rigorous peer review processes at risk. The working group, led by cOAlition S, consists of a number of research performing and research funding organizations, as well as several other organizations active in scholarly publishing and research assessment. The working group is expected to complete its work in mid-2025.

In this contribution, we will give an update on the activities of the working group. We expect to present a draft version of the principles or guidelines that the working group will develop to help organizations improve the way peer review activities are recognized and rewarded. We will also discuss the pilots that members of the working group are going to perform to test the implementation of the proposed principles or guidelines. Organizations that are not (yet) part of the working group will be invited to provide feedback on the draft outcomes of the working group and to consider signing up for piloting the use of the proposed principles or guidelines.

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Fotis Mystakopoulos: Contextualising Research Assessment for Social Sciences and Humanities: Insights and Challenges from the GraspOS Project Pilot

Reform of research assessment is underway through several initiatives, most notably through the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA). EU-funded projects are also tackling the impact of Open Science and are investigating ways in which Open Science values can be incorporated into research assessment processes. One such project is GraspOS (Grant ID: 101095129), which aims to support the emerging policy reforms and pave the way towards an Open Science-aware Responsible Research Assessment (RRA) system. Even so, disciplines and thematic areas display significant differences and unique elements that must be taken into account when providing assessment. This presentation investigates the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) phenomenon.

A fundamental aspect of GraspOS is the creation of pilots to drive the activities of the project. OPERAS is leading the efforts of the SSH pilot in the thematic area category, and this presentation will report on the progress of the pilot’s objectives. Key aspects of the presentation include how internal workshops are shaping the outcomes of the pilot; how the Open Science Assessment Framework (OSAF) concept, and the SCOPE Framework for research evaluation inform and create the philosophical underpinnings for the research assessment criteria; and the preliminary results and feedback from the consultation exercise the pilot will conduct with the SSH community.

In summary, it will discuss the stakeholder mapping exercise, how OSAF is enabling Open Science principles to be part of the pilot practices, and the tools and services that are part of the project and can be used in an Open Science monitoring exercise. The presentation will conclude with the wider context of research assessment, the various initiatives that are driving research assessment reform forward, what the next steps for the pilot will be, and how collectively these initiatives can create capacity for change.

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Session 5: Open Collaboration for Scholar-led Publishing

April 25, 14:30–16:00

Chair: Drahomira Cupar

• Magdalena Wnuk, Marta Świetlik and Gabriela Manista: Bringing Innovation through Collaboration: OPERAS-PL and Open Access Book Publishers in Poland
• Karla Avanço and Arnaud Gingold: Empowering OPERAS Community through Harmonized Open Science Learning Paths 
• Enrico Pasini, Marta Caradonna and Cristina Marras: OPERAS in H2IOSC: Diamond Open Access Resources
• Benoit Epron, Ferry Adèle and Mermet Marion: What Is a Scientific Book? Approaches to Defining an Editorial Form
• Questions & Answers

Presentations:

Magdalena Wnuk, Marta Świetlik and Gabriela Manista: Bringing Innovation through Collaboration: OPERAS-PL and Open Access Book Publishers in Poland

Collaboration between various stakeholders is one of the indispensable elements needed to make Open Access not only a common but also a desired practice. OPERAS-PL has tested this assumption for the past year by building relationships with Polish publishers, and examining the Polish open access policy landscape in parallel project – PALOMERA and DIAMAS. Polish publishers are struggling with shortages of digitization of publishing practices, insufficient editorial teams and reluctance to change, present both in their teams and among the wider academic community. These phenomena are also expressed by the lack of policies or strategies for OA monographs in Poland. Monographs have long been perceived as a printed-only output necessary to prove one’s expertise and position in a discipline. Due to this tradition, electronic formats are often considered as supplementary to printed versions, whereas OA is perceived as lowering the prestige of a publication (Maryl et al. 2021). Policies – on the national or institutional level – are not necessary for the process to move forward, although their absence definitely hinders the effort and deepens the sense of loneliness in the struggle for OA publishing.

In response to the situation, OPERAS-PL conducts a project aimed at OA books’ publishing in the Polish humanities. Its purpose is to identify the needs of publishers and propose possible solutions, developed jointly in the course of activities initiated and moderated by the Polish node of OPERAS. We implemented various techniques and methods, such as: survey study, semi-structured interviews, and a design thinking workshop which provided in-depth insight into publishers’ needs, expectations and ways of thinking about solutions. The presentation will concentrate on the methods of building collaborations between various academic communities. Additional results will be reusable methodology of the study and recommendations for publishing houses. The project was funded by the Polish Ministry of Education and Science.

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Karla Avanço and Arnaud Gingold: Empowering OPERAS Community through Harmonized Open Science Learning Paths 

OPERAS is developing Open Science (OS) and Research Data Management (RDM) courses addressing the specific training needs of both the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) scientific communities and the scholarly communication professionals.
The methodology to prepare the training courses goes as follows. For the training in OS for the SSH, we begin the work by analysing the Minimal Viable Skillsets (MVS) for researchers already developed in the Skills4EOSC project. We then tailor the competencies and skills described in the MVS to the needs of the SSH community. Having researchers as main targets, we prepare learning paths and the related learning material for a Train of Trainers (ToT) course. As for the scholarly communication professionals, we prepare the MVS and the subsequent learning path and learning materials. The FAIR by design methodology, also developed in Skills4EOSC, is taken into account for the preparation of the material in both cases. The two learning paths should be tested through pilot courses. Their final version will be available at the end of 2024.
The general objective of the learning path for the SSH is to train the trainers that will guide researchers in recognizing discipline-specific Open Science principles as well as identifying the practices relevant to this scientific community at the different stages of the research workflow. This ToT also represents a valuable opportunity to connect with other SSH ERICs, such as CESSDA, DARIAH, and CLARIN, and to join forces in meeting our communities needs.
The learning path for scholarly communication professionals is still under construction. It aims to increase different actors’ competence in the Open Access landscape. This activity allows us to strengthen OPERAS ties with the community and to establish open collaborations with other projects such as DIAMAS and CRAFT OA.

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Enrico Pasini, Marta Caradonna and Cristina Marras: OPERAS in H2IOSC: Diamond Open Access Resources

The project “H2IOSC–Humanities and Heritage Italian Open Science Cloud” (NextGenerationEU/Italian RRP) includes the Italian nodes of Clarin, Dariah, Ehris, and OPERAS. In the OSC integrated environment, users will find software, tools, datasets, and services supporting specific needs of domain and cross-domain research. OPERAS will provide a set of pilot services, strongly oriented toward Diamond OA publishing. In particular, the two OUs of OPERAS will secure the development of:
1) a web application that will allow the creation, management and diamond-OA publishing of collections of resources. It aims at defining an environment for making available curated text/data resources, corpora, and semantic content from research work in the Humanities at large, in an open, interoperable, FAIRcompliant way. It will provide users with tools for managing data of ongoing production and organization in active research (as different to the repository-based deposit of legacy research datasets);
2) a web application that will allow researchers on the H2IOSC to manage the creation, diamond-OA publishing, and diffusion of scholarly digital editions, integrating into the workflow the tools provided by other H2IOSC services;
3) a web platform for proposing, peer-reviewing according to various options, openly discussing and reviewing, and diamond-OA publishing according to high standards of scientific quality, such non-journal items as position papers, technical reports, guidelines, policy papers, and similar grey literature that accompanies research;
4) a pluggable distribution system for not-real-time, possibly disconnected use of content-based services and resources, focused primarily but not exclusively on the remote fruition of those implemented by OPERAS.
The presentation will describe the development stage at the time, focusing on the co-design phase that will involve OUs, developers, and scholars from the relevant communities, as well as other stakeholders inside and outside the Italian national node OPERAS.it JRU.

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Benoit Epron, Ferry Adèle and Mermet Marion: What Is a Scientific Book? Approaches to Defining an Editorial Form

The term “book” now covers a wide range of formats (monographs, reports, conference proceedings, symposia, etc.). In addition to the issues of typologisation and the circulation of knowledge, the question of formats has to do with the development of Open Access and research funding policies, in which scientific works play a special role.

Little discussed in the reflections of the 2000s, they now constitute a specific subject of study due to the particular construction of this market. Often a unique document, in the sense that it is not part of a series of publications, scientific books are not always part of highly structured and stabilised publishing practices. In the humanities and social sciences, for example, there is sometimes a fine line between works aimed at a scientific readership and those aimed at a wider public.

It is therefore essential to identify the criteria used to consider a work to be scientific and covered by policies to encourage Open Access.

As part of the reflections initiated within the Observatoire de l’édition scientifique, a research project has been carried out by a group of students from the Master’s degree in Information Science at the HEG in Geneva. The aim is to develop a proposed naming typology for scientific works based on a combination of several methodological approaches.

Initially, the work focuses on an analysis of the policies in place in several French-speaking countries to support Open Science. This analysis was based on the institutional and legal texts that set out the framework for financial support for open access publishing for what they consider to be scientific works. It also made it possible to identify shared criteria and specific features depending on the country, the players in the publishing chain and the discipline.

In order to clarify this analysis in relation to existing practices, one of the tasks of the project is to process the data available on several institutional repositories, academic library catalogues and platforms for making Open Access works available.

The aim is, firstly, to identify the classification trees in which the works are distributed, in order to obtain an overview of the different forms adopted or accepted by the platforms. A first stage of data analysis to build up a corpus of publications and check whether the same title is identified in the same way from one platform to another. For this approach, books are cross-identified using their ISBN.

Secondly, processing the data from the platforms analysed makes it possible to assess existing practices by quantifying the volumes of documents identified in the various categories of works, by discipline (hard sciences, humanities, etc.) and by country. It is thus possible to highlight the formats favoured by the various academic communities and to observe the efficiency of the support policies put in place.

This study demonstrates the complexity of defining criteria and the strong impact they can have on the digital editorial chain.

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Session 6: Open Science Policies and Strategies

April 26, 10:00—11:30

Chair: Elena Šimukovič

• Niels Stern: The PALOMERA Funder Forum – A Case-Study of Open Access Book Policy Alignment in the Making
• Hanna Lahdenperä and Sami Syrjämäki: Finland – an Open Access Pioneer?
• Sylvia Koukounidou and Marina Angelaki: The University of Cyprus Library as a Catalyst for the Promotion of Open Science at the National and Institutional Level
• Aricia Bassinet, Jean-François Lutz and Aemil Querre: 2018–2023: 5 Years of Building a Strategy to Support Open Scholarly Communication, the Example of the Université de Lorraine
• Questions & Answers

Presentations:

Niels Stern: The PALOMERA Funder Forum – A Case-Study of Open Access Book Policy Alignment in the Making

This presentation will share insights into one of the key activities of the PALOMERA project, namely the Funder Forum.

PALOMERA (Policy Alignment for Open Access Monographs in the European Research Area) is a two-year project funded by Horizon Europe, ending 31st December 2024. It brings together 16 partners across Europe to investigate the landscape of Open Access (OA) funder policies and seeks to understand why only few of these include OA academic books.

Based on thorough data collection and research the project will develop actionable recommendations that address these challenges by proposing ways in which research funders and research performing organisations may align on a set of principles for OA book policies. Another way in which the project is addressing this challenge is by convening research funders and policy-makers in a Funder Forum (FF).

The first FF meeting took place on 23 May 2023 and saw participation from around 40 research funders representing over 20 countries. The engagement of the participants in the meeting was significant and showed a clear need for funders to come together to discuss policy making for open access books amongst peers. It also confirmed that some funders are very advanced in their policy making efforts in this field while others have not even considered developing such policies. The second FF meeting will take place on 20 November 2023 and will focus on business models and infrastructures.

The presentation will share the background and the current status of the FF supported by concrete examples and outcomes of the FF meetings. It will also share insights about future plans for the FF.

Furthermore, conference participants will be invited to contribute to the next FF meeting by providing observations and opinions that they think should be considered by the participants of the FF meeting planned for May 2024. This interaction will be managed using Mentimeter, thus allowing conference participants to add comments immediately and/or after the presentation.

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Hanna Lahdenperä and Sami Syrjämäki: Finland – an Open Access Pioneer?

This presentation provides an overview of the current state of open access in Finland through a discussion of national policy and the scholar-led publishing landscape.

Open access publishing in Finland is guided by an ambitious strategic goal: “All new research publications are immediately available via open access”. This is stated in the Declaration for Open Science and Research 2020–2025 (2020), which all Finnish research organisations as well as a good number of learned societies have signed. The Declaration was preceded by a policy component on open access to journal articles and conference publications (2019). Further policy components are being developed for books, theses, and professional publications.

The Finnish scholarly journals are largely published by learned societies, i.e. non-profit organisations that promote research and bring together researchers and amateur researchers. Some of these journals have been published open access for decades, and over 130 journals are now available open access on journal.fi, an Open Journal Systems-based management and publishing platform. A corresponding service for scholarly books, edition.fi, was launched in 2022 – both services are provided by the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies, a national co-operative body.

The Federation also houses the National Open Science and Research Coordination, a collaborative effort of the entire research community responsible for formulating national open science policies. In other words, the policy work is driven by the actors themselves rather than top-down mandates. This approach means that there is a mutual aim as well as concrete steps for the advancement of open science, but also that funding directives and, more importantly, funding sources are not prescribed. Presently, efforts are underway to develop funding models for both open access scholarly journals and open science and research in general.

This presentation presents an evolving open access landscape, highlighting both specific challenges and solutions.

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Sylvia Koukounidou and Marina Angelaki: The University of Cyprus Library as a Catalyst for the Promotion of Open Science at the National and Institutional Level

The European Council conclusions of May 2023 encourage member states “to step up support to the development of aligned institutional and funding policies and strategies regarding non-profit open access multi-format scholarly publishing models…”. Acknowledging the role of EU in influencing developments at the national level, our paper focuses on Cyprus, a country that over the past decade has made significant steps in transitioning to the open science paradigm as a result of the actions of policymakers to comply with EU initiatives and the participation of research institutions in EU-funded projects for the promotion of open science and related networks. More specifically, we will examine the role of the University of Cyprus (UCy) Library as a catalyst in this process. The UCy Library has been a strategic actor in this process through its active participation in EU-funded projects (OpenAIRE, PASTEUR4OA, FOSTER, NI4OS Europe, CEOS_SE) that support the transition to open science and the alignment of open science policies as well as its role in steering the national community. Our presentation will highlight the key role played by UCy Library in the development of institutional and national OS policy, the creation of a national open science community, in addition to raising awareness and training various stakeholders (policy makers, researchers, librarians) and providing tailored made services to these stakeholders. We will also examine the practices implemented, in terms of collaborations, infrastructure and other actions, in order to increase the level of engagement of local stakeholders and how this is expected to create the necessary base for the revolutionary revision of a decades culture change.

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Aricia Bassinet, Jean-François Lutz and Aemil Querre: 2018–2023: 5 Years of Building a Strategy to Support Open Scholarly Communication, the Example of the Université de Lorraine

In 2018, the Université de Lorraine (UL) laid the foundations for its Open Science (OS) policy by making its open repository the institution’s official bibliography. Today, it is involved in all OS areas: scientific publishing, research data, codes and software, bibliometrics.

It has achieved this first and foremost through a solid political will, structured in one OS steering committee and three operational committees led by the Open Science vice-president. Comprising researchers, information professionals, IT specialists and legal experts, they lead the university’s OS policy.

UL published a series of positions to encourage good publication practices, advise against the payment of Article Processing Charges, take a political stand on the so-called transforming agreements and support the Right Retention Strategy.

To support its decisions, UL made engaging financial choices. The university withdrew from Springer deal in 2017, then from Wiley deal in 2023. The funds released have been allocated to an annual support fund for OS infrastructures (€100,000), which helps major players in open scholarly communication like the DOAJ, Erudit and OpenEdition. The institution also provides financial aid (€30,000) for the continued existence and creation of diamond journals such as Philosphia Scientiae.

At the same time, UL has set up services and an internal professional network to support its researchers’ publishing initiatives. The university presses publish all books on Open Monograph Press with immediate open access while the journal publishing service supports the creation of new diamond journals. The publishing staff network brings together researchers, publishers and librarians to encourage the transition of the university’s publications to the diamond model.

In five years, the Université de Lorraine has built up a robust policy to support Open Science, and more particularly open scholarly communication, based on three pillars: a firm political will, clear budgetary guidelines and the deployment of support services.

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Session 7: Multilingualism and Collaboration

April 26, 10:00—11:30

Chair: Mikołaj Leszczuk

• Sy Holsinger, Suzanne Dumouchel and Luca De Santis: GoTriple: Innovative Multilingual Discovery Platform for SSH
• Maria Olímpia Especiosa: Translating Classics and Open Science: a Collaborative Approach to Hippocrates
• Masao Oi: Open Data Enables Utilization of Academic Achievements and Digital Cultural Resources and International Collaboration
• Tim Fellows: Octopusac: How Micro-Publications Can Improve Research Culture
• Questions & Answers

Presentations:

Sy Holsinger, Suzanne Dumouchel and Luca De Santis: GoTriple: Innovative Multilingual Discovery Platform for SSH

GoTriple is an innovative multilingual discovery platform for the social sciences and humanities (SSH). It provides one of the central access points for discovering and reusing research artefacts that are relevant to the wide variety of disciplines under the umbrella domain of SSH: publications and research data, project descriptions and researcher profiles are automatically imported from aggregators and source providers, semantically enriched and linked in GoTriple.

The platform enables users to:

discover and reuse open scholarly SSH resources, which are currently scattered across local and discipline-specific repositories, in multiple European languages;
find and connect with other researchers and projects across disciplinary, cultural and language boundaries;
make use of innovative tools and services to support research, visualisation of search results, web annotation, personalised recommendations and social networking;
explore new ways of funding research such as crowdfunding.

As far as the multilinguality support in GoTriple is concerned, currently the platform:
Provides automatic classification of content upon ingestion in 11 languages, namely: Croatian, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Slovenian, Spanish, Ukrainian
Uses for the Automatic annotation the TRIPLE Vocabulary which provides a hierarchical set of over 3.300 SSH-related concepts in these 12 languages: Croatian, Dutch (partial), English, French, Finnish, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Ukrainian.
Presents its user interface localised in various languages, including English, Italian and French.
GoTriple was inspired by the Isidore search engine developed by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). It is the Discovery Service of OPERAS, the Research Infrastructure supporting open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities in the European Research Area, and it is one of the services of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), specifically devoted to the SSH communities.

GoTriple is the main outcome of the European Research project TRIPLE (Transforming Research through Innovative Practices for Linked Interdisciplinary Exploration). TRIPLE has been funded under the Horizon 2020 framework and run from October 2019 until March 2023.

This presentation will focus on the latest updates to the platform and future plans, while aiming to engage the audience for feedback and suggestions for how the platform can improve and better serve its users.

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Maria Olímpia Especiosa: Translating Classics and Open Science: a Collaborative Approach to Hippocrates

The aim of this paper is to test and assess the potential of using collaborative translation platform by applying it to the specific scientific context of Greek medicine and its translation, specifically the translation of the 5th century BC Hippocratic treatise Regimen. The pilot version of platform is a result from a design study produced under a task WP5.5 of OPERAS Plus. Under the remit of my thesis project, the title of which is Hippocrates, Regimen. Study and annotated translation. Contribution of Open Science to the recognition of classical dietetics as cultural heritage, I will present the issues surrounding the translation of a classical language and the necessities classical philologists have regarding sharing and collaborating in textual analysis through factual examples.

Bearing in mind that translation has until today been an interpretation, a process of transferring meaning from one world to another, which is exponentiated with contexts with more than 2000 years, we propose a paradigm shift, suggesting a completely innovative approach to translation and textual edition commentaries with the contribution of Open Science, through testing the collaborative translation platform developed by UC Framework and the project ‘Classics and Open Science of CECH UC.

It can be said that translating places certain limitations on the translator, however, it is also in translation that the act of interpretation is consummated, one that is never complete and can always be revised. In this sense, the experience of a project like this one at the University of Coimbra is justified. With our proposal for the use of this pilot, we intend to demonstrate and present advantages, restrictions and suggest updates, regarding this type of tools, such as the fact that all the notes of our collaborative translation serve as a critical apparatus for the entire translation, or how being able to have several translation proposals for the same excerpt can allow for the elimination of some stages of text revision.

By presenting practical examples of features of collaborative translation, with this paper I intend to discuss aspects that relate Open Science, scientific collaboration, Multilingualism and Classical studies in an attempt to open up a wider analysis of academic community, publishers and providers of services for the scientific community.

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Masao Oi: Open Data Enables Utilization of Academic Achievements and Digital Cultural Resources and International Collaboration
The advancement of informatization and pandemics revealed issues surrounding innovation in the learning environment. In addition, global history, which captures events from a cross-regional perspective, is gaining importance. Furthermore, the current prevalence of AI and fake news calls for a learning environment taking into account the credibility of information. Therefore, there are increasing expectations for the educational use of academic results by research institutions and digital resources by GLAM.
Meanwhile, a systematic method of relating the various cultural heritage to school learning has not yet been established. In addition, issues of accessibility and restrictions on secondary use of resources also need to be resolved. In particular, there is a lack of development of utilization methods and accumulation of case studies for digital resources from overseas. To solve these issues, this study aims to “promote the educational use of academic results and digital cultural resources domestically and internationally.
In this study, digital resources were used to co-create ” learning materials” and the outcomes were made available as machine-readable open data. Specifically, in collaboration with members of Europeana, workshops were held to co-create learning materials using European and Japanese resources. In addition, metadata based on the perspective of the educational field was assigned and published on IIIF, and RDF datasets and search applications were created.
Co-created materials were designed as cross-curricular frameworks on diverse topics, such as sugar and architecture. In addition, some materials were organized with activities to search for openly licensed resources and discussions on how filters should be used. It was suggested that open secondary use requirements are a prerequisite for utilization and the importance of fostering information literacy.
The bottom-up networking case study of “people” and “data” in this research will contribute to the promotion of open science by presenting a way of collaboration that connects academic results and cultural heritage with school education.

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Tim Fellows: Octopusac: How Micro-Publications Can Improve Research Culture

Whilst many changes have occurred in scholarly communications during recent years, the concept of the research paper as a static, all-encompassing document still reigns supreme as the primary means of engaging with research outputs.

We believe that this will change in the coming years, and that it is up to us as a community to ensure that this change happens in a way that promotes best practice, equity, and openness. In this talk, we would discuss what can be achieved when the traditional publishing model is augmented with a re-imagined model of “micro publications”. Octopus.ac is a new, UKRI funded platform that allows researchers to create small, incremental publications that better align with how research is conducted, and in doing so promotes best practice, equity, and openness. Free to read, free to publish, and entirely open source, this is a new way to register research that is free, fast and fair.

We believe that many of the problems in the current research culture from one principal issue: that journals are being pulled in two different directions – the dissemination of findings to practitioners and general audiences, and being the primary research record of what has been done, when and by whom, in detail, for the benefit of specialists. This leads to key content being dismissed to supporting appendixes, while researchers write their results in a highly-narrative, attention-grabbing way to maximise impact.

Octopus.ac aims to address these by providing “micro publications” that represent different parts of the research process and can be published independently. Publications are linked to aid navigation and discovery, as well as to showcase the inherent interconnectedness of research. Any of these micro publications can be reviewed individually, and reviews are treated as a publication in their own right, recognising peer review as a valuable skill and incentivizing culture of constructive feedback.

In this talk, we would describe how Octopus aims to sit alongside journals to create a new culture of collaboration and recognition, improve access to research outputs, and provide a new academic incentive structure to reward best practice and recognise specialisation.

More details about the platform and its aims can be found at https://www.octopus.ac/

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Session 8: Innovative Services, Tools and Technologies Supporting Open Science

April 26, 14:15—15:45

Chair: Magdalena Wnuk

• Mamta Dwivedi: Introducing Donau4KIT: A collaborative initiative for Promoting and Supporting Diamond OA Journals
• Emmy Tsang and Lauren Collister: A New Tool to Facilitate Discovery and Adoption of Open Infrastructure for Research and Scholarship
• Sofia Papastamkou and Anisa Hawes: Programming Historian. Presenting the Growth and Evolution of an Open Access, Community-led, Multilingual Journal of Methods in the Humanities
• Luca De Santis and Lorenzo Armando: Pathfinder – The Publishing Service Portal from OPERAS
• Questions & Answers

Presentations:

Mamta Dwivedi: Introducing Donau4KIT: A collaborative initiative for Promoting and Supporting Diamond OA Journals

Developed as a part of the Diamond-Thinking Initiative at Karlsruhe (Germany), Donau4KIT is a two-year research project that started in September 2023 with BMBF Funding. Ever since its proposal stage, the project has been a collaboration between universities (Karlsruhe and Stuttgart Libraries) and with journal hosting bodies (Ubiquity Press). This is an explorative pilot project, which situates libraries as proactive actors.

Recent studies on the situation of the open access journals in Switzerland (Hahn et al. 2023) and Germany (Taubert, Sterzik, and Bruns 2023) have shown that financial uncertainty and overburdening of academic volunteers, working in journal processing and management, are the two main challenges hindering the sustainability of any diamond OA journal. Therefore, development of alternate models of financing the publication process and reduction of burden of labour through automatization are the two key strategic solutions. With this project, the KIT-Bibliothek takes initiatives to provide support infrastructure, both technical and financial, to scholars in developing and sustaining diamond model of open access journals. The support is offered through various partnerships with other organisations and institutions.
Donau4KIT project at KIT- Bibliothek also aims not only to develop theoretical models via market research, such as surveys of the current demands of market, but to also test the success of those models in promotion of diamond OA journals. The models will facilitate the foundation of new journals as well as the smooth transition of existing pay-to-publish and pay-to-read journals into diamond OA journals.

With the Donau4KIT, we aim towards a more author-, researcher-, and reader-friendly ecosystem of open access journals. Our understanding is that for a sustainable ecosystem, a partnership between multiple actors, such as authors, researchers, publishers, data-hosting institutions, and libraries is vital. At the conference in April 2024, we would like to share the results of our endeavours during the first six months of our project.

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Emmy Tsang and Lauren Collister: A New Tool to Facilitate Discovery and Adoption of Open Infrastructure for Research and Scholarship

Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) works to increase the investment in and adoption of open infrastructure to further equitable access to and participation in research. From our research and community engagement work over the past years, we have heard from decision makers at institutions and funders who would like to adopt and invest in open infrastructure about their pain points in discovering and evaluating open infrastructure services.

Building on these insights, we are developing Infra Finder, a tool that will support decision makers in making informed decisions about adopting and investing in open infrastructure. This new tool evolves from the Catalog of Open Infrastructure Services (COIs) prototype and will launch in December 2023 with 60 services enabling the sharing of research publications and data.

In this talk, we will introduce Infra Finder, including its design principles and development process. Particularly, we’d like to share the lessons we’ve learnt in collaborating with open infrastructure services and with decision makers in co-creating this tool, such that it would be useful and beneficial for both groups. We will also demo Infra Finder and outline the roadmap for its development.

We believe that Infra Finder has great potential in not only increasing the adoption of open infrastructure, but also in fostering collaboration and knowledge exchange between open infrastructure services. We’d love to use this opportunity to solicit feedback from the OPERAS community on how we can increase the utility and value of this tool for these communities, and ultimately support open scholarly communication and research in social sciences and humanities.

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Sofia Papastamkou and Anisa Hawes: Programming Historian. Presenting the Growth and Evolution of an Open Access, Community-led, Multilingual Journal of Methods in the Humanities

Programming Historian (PH) is an open access multilingual journal of methods in the humanities. It publishes peer-reviewed lessons that help humanists learn a wide range of digital methods, tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate research and teaching.
PH follows the diamond model of open access: no APC are applied and the contents are under CC BY 4.0 license. Furthermore, we advocate open source values in all aspects of our work: the lessons make use of open source programming languages and software whenever possible, and each lesson is open peer reviewed.

PH was initially created in 2007 as a project led by two Canadian historians who encouraged the use of Python and the application of digital methods and tools in historical research (Turkel & MacEachern 2007). Its initial form was a PDF-format online book. The project found success, meeting the needs of humanists who sought training in the digital methods. As of 2012, an editorial board was formed to launch PH as an online, open access, peer reviewed journal initially published in English. From 2016 to 2020, PH was progressively joined by three further editorial teams (hispanophone, francophone and lusophone). Today, PH makes available 102 lessons in English, 60 in Spanish, 43 in Portuguese and 27 in French.

A community-led initiative of researchers and practitioners who share a common interest in the appropriation of digital methods in research and teaching in the humanities, PH is run currently by 39 active members including volunteer editors, ombuds and trustees. It is administered by a charity and its Board of Trustees. Since 2021, the journal has undergone a process of professionalization and currently employs two members of paid staff: a Publishing Manager and a Publishing Assistant.

We wish to present the process of building PH, its evolution, and the challenges such an initiative faces in the global environment of community-led scholarly communication.

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Luca De Santis and Lorenzo Armando: Pathfinder – The Publishing Service Portal from OPERAS

Pathfinder (https://pathfinder.operas-eu.org/) is an OPERAS service that aims at helping editors and editorial managers to find publishing services that they can use to perform their editorial tasks on open access publications (journals, books, editions and other research outputs,…) in social sciences and humanities.

It consists of a web-based catalogue where scholarly communication services are presented, mainly those managed by OPERAS members but possibly by other providers as well. While editors and editorial managers are the main target users of the platform, authors can also use Pathfinder to receive suggestions for publishing the results of their research.

The current platform has been developed within the OPERAS-PLUS research project and was released in August 2023. While this is the first publicly accessible version of the Pathfinder, an initial prototype of this service had been developed in the past during the OPERAS-P research project, which ended in June 2021. This former experience helped to better define the requirements and expectations that led to shaping the current version of the platform.

Its web back-office has been designed to simplify the process of entering and updating data. It offers a complete classification system for service types, whose categories have been selected as a result of a collaborative effort with other OPERAS partners.
Users can seamlessly search for services and service providers using a user-friendly interface: results can be further filtered through a faceted interface. Services and service providers are presented in detail, ensuring users have all of the necessary information at their fingertips. Additionally, a user can quickly click on the suggested searches, curated by the editorial team, while a search wizard helps users in specifying the right conditions to find what they are looking for.

Users can register in Pathfinder through the OPERAS ID service to have access to advanced features. For example, registered users can create personalized lists of services, referred to as “Kits”, which can be shared with collaborators. Also, to foster collaboration and communication among the Pathfinder community of users, a dedicated space on the OPERAS Mattermost chat platform has been activated. This space encourages the exchange of suggestions, enhancing the overall experience for everyone involved.

While the main development of the platform has been concluded, data entry and curation of services and service providers will continue until the end of the OPERAS-PLUS project. Synergies with other OPERAS projects (with DIAMAS in particular) has been considered, in order to enrich the quality and dimension of the Pathfinder’s catalogue.

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Session 9: Engagement and Collaboration within Research Communities

April 26, 14:15—15:45

Chair: Irena Vipavc Brvar

• Elina Late, Raf Guns, Janne Pölönen, Jadranka Stojanovski, Mimi Urbanc and Michael Ochsner: The Role of National Learned Societies in the Social Sciences and Humanities
• Chris de Loof and Ines Vodopivec: Europeana Research Community as Intersection of European Digital Cultural Environment and Open Science Communication
• Elena Svahn, Karolina Andersdotter and Miki Kallio: Public Libraries as Catalysts for Citizen Science: Expanding Opportunities for Democratisation of Science
• Martina Dvorakova and Margreet Nieborg: Transition to Open Access: The AEUP Perspective
• Questions & Answers

Presentations:

Elina Late, Raf Guns, Janne Pölönen, Jadranka Stojanovski, Mimi Urbanc and Michael Ochsner: The Role of National Learned Societies in the Social Sciences and Humanities

Our research examines the status of European learned societies in SSH through cross-country survey data. We investigate their primary goals, activities, internationalisation levels, organisation, funding, membership, and recent changes, addressing potential pressures arising from them. We conducted a survey involving learned societies across seven European countries, merging the data with a prior Finnish study, yielding responses from 194 learned societies (a 37% response rate).

Our findings reveal that 79% of these societies primarily aim to promote specific scholarly disciplines. They are heavily involved in event organisation (95%) and publishing (86%), with a lower focus on research activities. The primary publication formats are peer reviewed journals, book series, and reports/policy briefs. Multilingualism is prevalent, with over 60% of societies using multiple languages in their publications.

National collaborations are more common than international ones, with informal contacts and joint projects being the typical forms. Most societies collaborate with universities, research institutions, and government administrations/ministries. Volunteerism is substantial, with 62% of societies lacking salaried employees and nearly half relying on 90-100% voluntary work. Many operate on budgets under €20,000. Membership fees (average €40) are the main revenue source, supplemented by government subsidies and grants. Societies typically have 390 individual members. Most SSH societies in our study have not undergone significant changes in the past five years, challenging expectations of their declining role. This study fills a crucial gap in understanding learned societies in SSH across Europe.

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Chris de Loof and Ines Vodopivec: Europeana Research Community as Intersection of European Digital Cultural Environment and Open Science Communication

In November 2021, the European Commission issued a recommendation on a common European data space for cultural heritage, putting Europeana data space in the foregrounding of digital transformation in cultural heritage institutions, therefrom also shaping the Open Science communication in Social Sciences and Humanities fields, which use cultural heritage as a subject and a source for research. Much work has already been done at Europeana to advocate for public domain digitised cultural heritage content and reuse of Open Access data. Besides huge engagement in content aggregation and curation, additional activities are driven by several special interest communities of the Europeana Network Association, where exchange of knowledge, expertise and best practice solutions are in the core of their work. Europeana Research Community unites professionals working at cultural or research institutions, universities and infrastructures, ministries, and local governments, as well as in the private sector. The Europeana Research Community is fostering European strategical development of cultural heritage data as humanities research data, as well as advocating for the principles of Open Science, by promoting digital collections and digital tools as means of innovation. The main purpose of this presentation is to present the work of the Europeana Research Community, encompassing collaboration for community-driven scholarly communication within the framework of Europeana data space. This paper will also discuss possible interconnections of the Europeana Research Community and OPERAS research infrastructure.

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Elena Svahn, Karolina Andersdotter and Miki Kallio: Public Libraries as Catalysts for Citizen Science: Expanding Opportunities for Democratisation of Science

Citizen science has gained significant traction in recent years as a powerful approach for scientific research and community engagement. Public libraries as key community pillars are emerging as facilitators of citizen science initiatives connecting individuals with researchers and enabling citizens’ active participation in the research process.
Public library supported citizen science initiatives may have a wide range of benefits and impacts. Libraries offer educational and experiential opportunities for users, promoting lifelong learning, access to scientific research, discovery, and fostering scientific literacy and community engagement. Leveraging their unique position as knowledge centres, libraries contribute to the democratisation of science, enhance public understanding of scientific principles, and encourage active citizen engagement. Engaging with citizen science involves engaging the public in scientific research and allows individuals to contribute to the advancement of scientific knowledge.
In Finland, public libraries are starting to recognise the promising possibilities of serving as catalysts for citizen science. Libraries can undertake various approaches and initiatives to promote citizen science, including the provision of resources, training programmes, and community events. This paper explores the possibilities of public libraries serving as catalysts for citizen science in Finland. Leveraging their unique position as trusted community hubs and knowledge centres, libraries can contribute to the democratisation of science, enhance public understanding of scientific principles, and encourage active citizen engagement.
A key benefit of public library- supported citizen science initiatives is increased access to and engagement with scientific research. Libraries can serve as hubs for information and facilitate the dissemination of scientific knowledge to the wider public. Through their activities, libraries can fight disinformation and fake news. Furthermore, public libraries offer a unique space for collaboration and knowledge sharing among scientists, citizens, and library professionals. Through empirical evidence, this paper demonstrates the potential of public libraries in Finland as key players in advancing citizen science and promoting the active participation of citizens in scientific exploration and problem-solving. The paper also highlights the challenges associated with implementing citizen science initiatives in public libraries, such as limited resources, technical expertise, and funding constraints.
In conclusion, public libraries can play a pivotal role in the citizen science landscape by taking the role as catalysts. Their unique position as trusted community hubs, knowledge centres, and media and information literacy experts enables public libraries to create opportunities for citizens to actively participate in scientific research. By promoting citizen science, public libraries enhance their relevance and value within their communities while contributing to the democratisation of science.

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Martina Dvořáková and Margreet Nieborg: Transition to Open Access: The AEUP Perspective

The Association of European University Presses welcomes the growing support for Open Science and Open Access publishing in Europe and around the world. While we are aware that the switch to Open Access cannot be made overnight, and that it is not easy for some members to secure a sustainable business model, we are convinced that Open Science is the right way forward, not only in terms of the wise use of public funds, but also in the context of inclusion and diversity, and not least as a response to the intensive development of artificial intelligence and the associated transformation of society.
The recent EU Council’s Conclusions on scholarly publishing which, among other things, calls for support for the development of publishing models led by public research organisations, only goes to show that university presses can play an important role in the development of Open Science.
Although not all of the AEUP members are Open Access publishers yet, all of them are at different stages between the sale of print books as their main source of funding and the sustainable operation of an Open Access only mode.
The presentation will focus on the transition to Open Access publishing, its pitfalls and the possible light at the end of the tunnel. It begins with an overview of AEUP’s position regarding Open Access and a description of how Open Access is currently being implemented among the members. Some have their own system, others use third party services and others are in the process of deciding what is best for them. We will then try to summarise the most common obstacles that publishers face on the path to Open Access and provide some inspiring examples of good practice that we have collected from our members. If you want to join us on the path, the AEUP is always open to new members.

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Session 10: Innovative Tools and Metadata

April 26, 16:00—17:30

Chair: Antoine Cordelois

• Margo Bargheer, Sy Holsinger, Maxim Kupreyev, Sona Arasteh: CRAFT-OA – Creating a Robust Accessible Federated Technology for Open Access
• Tomasz Umerle, Tomasz Parkoła, Aleksandra Nowak and Patryk Hubar: Improving Scholarly Metadata for SSH – Dariah.lab Project
• Antica Culina, Marija Purgar, Tin Klanjšček, Paul Gasziou, Shinichi Nakagawa: Pre-registration Platforms and Improvement in Research Credibility
• Cristiana Voinov: Moralizing Immersive Technologies – the Ethics of XR in Research Settings and the Limits of Research Integrity Instruments
• Questions & Answers

Presentations:

Margo Bargheer, Sy Holsinger, Maxim Kupreyev, Sona Arasteh: CRAFT-OA – Creating a Robust Accessible Federated Technology for Open Access

The project CRAFT-OA (Creating a Robust Accessible Federated Technology for Open Access) aims to consolidate the Diamond Open Access publishing landscape by providing innovative technical solutions, recommendations and guidelines that enable publishers to reach the necessary professionalization and technical maturity levels in Diamond OA. CRAFT-OA unites 23 consortium partners from 14 European countries, engaged in institutional publishing and its infrastructures. CRAFT-OA is working closely with OPERA’s sister projects PALOMERA and DIAMAS, all of them delivering complementary results to Diamond OA expertise. The focus of CRAFT-OA in this bundle lies on the technical aspects of improving visibility, recognizability and discoverability of Diamond OA publishing.

With 15 months of the CRAFT-OA project over, this talk will deliver an outline of the key results achieved by its seven Work Packages. Apart from the management tasks, such as the establishment of the advisory and technical boards, the organization of the kick-off meetings and two general assemblies, the activities of the project included the creation of specific plans for the protection of personal data, quality assurance, data management, and communication and dissemination. An in-depth analysis of Diamond OA technical gaps, as well as reports on practices, standards and challenges faced by the OA journals and platforms established a solid foundation for the CRAFT-OA upskilling and training activities. Training materials and curricula will be complemented by the technical solutions created by the project.

The CRAFT-OA products and services are passing now from the stage of requirement engineering and specifications to hands-on development. The CRAFT-OA service portfolio will include Diamond Discovery Hub [DDH], developed by WP5, OpenAIRE Publisher Dashboard and a federated AAI proxy service for Single Sign-On access, both of which are in the scope of WP6. The talk will deliver updates on the development of CRAFT-OA products, such as:

• Plugins enabling JATS XML based interoperability between OJS, Janeway and Lodel (WP 4)
• EOSC Onboarding of Publishing Services:
• • OJS/Janeway plugin for the EOSC Interoperability Framework (WP6)
• • OJS plugins for integrating feedback from EOSC catalog (WP6)
• OJS Plug-in for the journal Visibility Pathfinder (WP5)
• OJS connector for OpenAIRE Research Graph (WP6)

In addition, the ongoing work on the simplified installation and update procedures of OJS, Lodel and Janeway (WP4), OJS core feature enhancements for metadata quality, extensibility, and GDPR & Multilingualism (WP4) will be highlighted.

Finally, we will explain some key achievements of the Craft-OA communications team, which supervises the contents of the CRAFT-OA website, and reaches out to the Diamond OA community, utilizing, among other tools, a communication kit.

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Tomasz Umerle, Tomasz Parkoła, Aleksandra Nowak and Patryk Hubar: Improving Scholarly Metadata for SSH – Dariah.lab Project

This presentation highlights Dariah.lab’s contributions to improving metadata quality in Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). Two key technologies are discussed: the Culture Data Aggregator (ADEK) and Enrich. ADEK aims to centralize disparate cultural data, applying machine-learning and controlled vocabulary. Enrich, serving as both a standalone service and ADEK’s backend, extends keyword sets using Linked Open Data (LOD) technologies.
Enrich initially identifies controlled vocabularies within text string and links them both to the external identifiers provided by services like Wikidata and other controlled vocabularies delivered by national institutions and projects like National Library of Poland, Library of Science and Kronik@. Finally, the enriched vocabulary is converted into RDF triples. As an example, more than half of the all subject headings originating from Federation of Digital Libraries were recognized in National Library of Poland Resources which has enabled the enhancement and standardization of metadata quality from both institutions.
Culture Data Aggregator utilizes Enrich as an integral component while relying on Wikibase for its backend architecture. ADEK also features its own distinct graphical user interface, which includes functionalities typical of a discovery system to facilitate advanced information search and retrieval.
Proposed information preparation and publication workflow ensures that the data processed by Enrich and published in ADEK are compliant with FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles and align with the standards of 5-Star Linked Open Data.
Challenges and areas for future work include the active consideration of incorporating Large Language Models (LLMs) into the metadata refinement process. Additionally, ongoing efforts are focused on the identification and integration of new data sources. Most notably, interinstitutional collaboration holds a vital role in the project’s future development. Collaborative endeavours with various academic and private institutions are being actively pursued to ensure the continuous expansion of both data and lexical resources.

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Antica Culina, Marija Purgar, Tin Klanjšček, Paul Glasziou and Shinichi Nakagawa: Pre-registration Platforms and Improvement in Research Credibility

Research suffers from many inefficiencies. These lead to much research being avoidably wasted, with no or limited value to the end user (e.g. an estimated 82-89% of ecological research, and 85% of medical research). Here, we argue that the quality and impact of ecological (and other) research could be drastically improved by registration: pre-registration, and registered reports. However, without a coordinated action of the overall research support and publishing system, the transition to more registrations and their impact on the research quality will be very slow, if anything.

We discuss a registration system that would best serve the field of ecology. This system partly corresponds to solutions already available in other fields. However, we suggest several novel aspects that a system of registration, especially that of pre-registration, should offer if it were to truly make a substantial contribution to increasing quality and reducing waste in ecological research. These include alternative ways of registering study components, submission of the study results to the registry, implementation of quality checks for registrations, and facilitated search for registered studies and their results (user-friendly search interface, exposing meta-data on registered studies to search engines and platforms). We believe that some of the considerations we suggest could and should be used in the fields other than ecology.

We survey and review the evidence from other fields on whether registration reduces research waste. The evidence largely comes from medicine, where registries of studies have been in substantial use since 2000. We suggest short- and long-term actions that could increase registration in ecology (and are applicable to other fields too) and reduce research waste. One of these is the recognition of pre-registration (including the results of the study that can be added to the registry later) as a form of publication.

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Cristiana Voinov: Moralizing Immersive Technologies – the Ethics of XR in Research Settings and the Limits of Research Integrity Instruments

It goes without saying that research assessing and addressing the impact of immersive technologies (XR) like virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) needs doing. Impact research thus far has widely focused on neuro-cognitive and psycho-behavioral aspects, such as how XR – VR especially – may alter mental states or enhance skill retention, for example. More recently, scholars have begun tending to the less empirical dimensions of XR use, such as its socio-legal and philosophical implications. While this turn has been encouraging, there is still much work to be done. A domain with particularly modest scholarly engagement is that which explores the ethical development, implementation, and use of XR within research or academic settings. How should researchers be using this technology? Little is known about how researchers should establish, interpret and practice XR ethics, and how current ethics instruments, tasked with guiding ethical practice, meet the unique ethical challenges posed by XR use. Therefore, my presentation will focus on the ethical challenges of conducting research using immersive technology. The aim is to establish a descriptive account of the norms and principles associated with XR use in research contexts specifically, in both philosophy of technology literature as well as key European research policy documents. This will provide the foundation for an exploration of what and how researchers actually “apply” ethics within an XR context – how they interact with ethics instruments, how they understand, interpret and then apply ethics when using XR. I will show how inherent features of XR such as the scale and type of data it can gather, as well as the difficulty – perhaps impossibility – of effectively anonymizing this data, is in tension with common research integrity values espoused by instruments such as the European Code of Conduct. The hyper-intimacy of VR, its ability to track and store details about a research participant to a much greater extent than other technologies, poses a unique challenge to the Open Science paradigm where data accessibility and sharing is highly valued. I will claim that research integrity instruments alone are insufficient to address the problems posed by XR technologies, and offer preliminary paths towards ethical XR use in research settings.

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