Running Projects
The OPERAS-PLUS project aims at supporting this process and the development of the infrastructure in its preparatory phase and on its way towards implementation. It will empower OPERAS to further
- Strengthen its governance structure in regard to financial, legal and human resources
- Support the network of national nodes and their national activities
- Develop the services portfolio providing both required technology and a monitoring system for services development
- Maximise OPERAS’ impact in the ERA and at international level by extending it beyond its current scope and onboarding new members and countries in the infrastructure.
The OPERAS-PLUS project started on September 1, 2022, has a duration of 36 months and runs from September 2022 to August 2025 under Grand Agreement Number 101079608 (https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101079608). It receives funding from the Horizon Europe framework Infra-Dev in order to support new ESFRI research infrastructure projects in their preparatory phase. The body of work will stand in the continuity of work already realised in the former projects (OPERAS-D, OPERAS-P, HIRMEOS) and collaborate with the running projects COESO, TRIPLE, and DIAMAS, and soon with other projects to come in 2023.
- Start date: September 1, 2022
- End date: August 31, 2025
The LUMEN project is an initiative to advance cross-domain collaboration and discovery processes in four academic fields: Mathematics (Maths), Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), Earth System Science (ES) and Molecular Dynamics (MD). Through interdisciplinary solutions spanning all four domains, LUMEN sets out to significantly improve discovery by innovation, simplifying initial research phases and facilitating access to advanced AI-powered tools for researchers. LUMEN aims to transform and strengthen EOSC services by promoting innovative and customisable solutions for data discovery. LUMEN thereby seeks to attract new users while simultaneously fostering Open Science principles.
- Start date: January 1, 2025
- End date: December 31, 2027
The GRAPHIA (Knowledge Graphs, AI Services and Next Generation Instrumentation for R&D in Social Sciences and Humanities) project leverages cutting-edge technology and Open Science to support and multiply the impact of social sciences and humanities (SSH) research on issues of social inequality, demographics, migration, war and violent conflict, misinformation and the preservation and promotion of European cultural heritage. Through the creation of the first comprehensive Knowledge Graph for SSH (SSH KG) enriched with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models (LLM) applications, GRAPHIA will transform SSH data into a more machine-readable and actionable format, significantly improving SSH data visualisation and analysis capacities, empowering researchers to uncover patterns and insights from unstructured data, illuminating social phenomena and cultural trends with unprecedented clarity.
- Start date: January 1, 2025
- End date: December 31, 2027
ATRIUM (Advancing fronTier Research In the arts and hUManities)is a European Commission-funded research project, launched in January 2024, which will run for four years. The project bridges four leading European Research Infrastructures: DARIAH (arts and humanities), ARIADNE (archaeology), CLARIN (languages), and OPERAS (open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities), and brings 17 partners and 12 affiliated entities from 12 countries across Europe.
The goal of the project is to make groundbreaking contributions to the consolidation and expansion of services. ATRIUM’s main objectives are to:
- Enhance Access by enhancing the quality of metadata in existing catalogues and repositories;
- Make Research Widely Available by reaching diverse communities across Europe, with a particular focus on citizen science and people with disabilities;
- Create Workflows so that researchers can best learn how to apply digital methods to their work;
- Facilitate Training through a number of project initiatives such as ATRIUM Skillset Assessment, ATRIUM Bridge, and ATRIUM Curriculum;
- Establish a Peer Review Framework to maintain research outputs essential for building and maintaining research infrastructures;
- Strengthen Data Management Practices by establishing a smooth flow of data across various services.
- Start date: 01 January 2024
- End date: 31 December 2027
The project “Creating a Robust Accessible Federated Technology for Open Access” (CRAFT-OA), carried out by 23 experienced partners from 14 European countries, coordinated by the University of Göttingen (Germany) starts in January 2023 and runs for 36 months.
Funded within the Horizon Europe Framework Programme (https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101094397), the project aims to equally evolve and strengthen the Diamond Open Access (Diamond OA, no fees towards authors or readers) institutional publishing landscape. By offering tangible services and tools for the entire life cycle of journal publishing, CRAFT OA empowers local and regional platforms and service providers to upscale, professionalise and reach stronger interoperability with other scientific information systems for content and platforms. These developments will help researchers and editors involved in publishing.
The project focuses on four strands of action to improve the Diamond OA model:
(1) Provide technical improvements for journal platforms and journal software
(2) Build communities of practice to foster overall infrastructure improvement
(3) Increase visibility, discoverability and recognition for Diamond OA publishing
(4) Integrate Diamond OA publishing with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and other large-scale data aggregators.
Consortium partners in CRAFT-OA bring their long-standing engagement in institutional publishing and infrastructure and are committed to sustaining and developing capacities in the field. CRAFT-OA will deliver technical tools, training events, training materials, information, and services for the Diamond OA institutional publishing environment. It will foster communities of practice with the capacity to sustain the project improvements over time.
- Start date: 01 January 2023
- End date: 31 December 2025
OPERAS is pleased to participate in the Horizon Europe project called ‘Developing Institutional Open Access Publishing Models to Advance Scholarly Communication’ (DIAMAS), coordinated by OpenEdition, Aix-Marseille University. The 3-year project, which was awarded a grant of €3m, brings together 23 European organisations that will map out the landscape of Diamond Open Access publishing in the European Research Area and develop common standards, guidelines and practices for the Diamond publishing sector. The project partners will also formulate recommendations for research institutions to coordinate sustainable support for Diamond publishing activities across Europe. The main objective of the project is to deliver a Capacity Center for OA Diamond publishers to solve their main challenges.
In this perspective, OPERAS leads a work package dedicated to the building of this capacity centre which will provide through a common access point different toolkits, training, and communication channels to improve the quality of Institutional Publishing Service Providers (IPSPs).
A variety of skills and expertise has been gathered to facilitate the work and reach the objectives. 23 organisations from 12 countries are working together in the DIAMAS consortium. Moreover, the DIAMAS project interacts closely with the global community of the ‘Action Plan for Diamond Open Access’ signatories to support Diamond Open Access Publishing.
- Start date: September 1, 2022
- End date: August 31, 2025
The GraspOS project kicked off on January 2023. The 3-year research project, funded by the European Commission through the Research Infrastructures Horizon Europe Framework, aims to build the European Federated Open Metrics Infrastructure in a decentralised way, where: different types of data come together to create metrics; tools and services are developed to improve EU or global infrastructures but are also shared with national or institutional monitoring platforms; indicators and assessment protocols are developed, tested and shared. A metrics infrastructure that by its nature supports research organisations and communities to design their own paths on how to include OS in their RRA protocols and that they select solutions that meet their needs and may apply them at their own controlled environment and own pace. The end result would be to bring a sense of openness and consistency in the metrics domain, which would also allow diversity in assessment and innovation in meta-research.
- Start date: 01 January 2023
- End date: 31 December 2025
OA Book Usage Data Trust
The project’s mission is to champion strategies for the improved publication and management of open-access books by exchanging reliable usage data in a trusted, equitable, and community-governed way.
Funded by the Mellon Foundation from July 2022 – June 2025.
During the coming years of the project, it aims to formalise the Data Trust effort’s community-governance mechanisms, quantify data trust participation benefits in terms of an ROI, and understand the full operational costs related to an international data space for OA book usage. In addition to establishing mechanisms to coordinate global community governance, infrastructure and stakeholder engagement, a scalable budgetary model will be created. Most importantly, community workshops and consultations will be facilitated to create a multilateral data-processing and stewardship rule book for the OA book usage data trust participation. Project outputs will pave the way for: 1) the transparent, trusted processing of open and privileged usage data, 2) streamlined usage data aggregation, and 3) ethical usage data benchmarking.
Principal Investigators
- Christina Drummond, University of North Texas
- Paolo Manghi, OpenAIRE
- Yannick Legré, OPERAS
Academic books continue to play an important role in scholarly production and research communication, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. As an important output of scholarly production, academic books must be included in open science/open access policies and strategies developed by research funders and institutions, to ensure that open science becomes the modus operandi of modern science across all disciplines. However, contrary to article publishing in journals (especially in the areas of Science, Technology, and Medicine) academic books have not been a focus point for open access (OA) policymakers. Consequently, books are only rarely mandated to be published OA by research funders and institutions.
PALOMERA will investigate the reasons for this situation across geographies, languages, economies, and disciplines within the European Research Area (ERA). Through desk studies, surveys, in-depth interviews, and use cases, PALOMERA will collect, structure, analyse, and make available knowledge that can explain the challenges and bottlenecks that prevent OA to academic books. Based on this evidence, PALOMERA will provide actionable recommendations and concrete resources to support and coordinate aligned funder and institutional policies for OA books, with the overall objective of speeding up the transition to open access for books to further promote open science.
The recommendations will address all relevant stakeholders (research funders and institutions, researchers, publishers, infrastructure providers, libraries, and national policymakers). The PALOMERA consortium broadly represents all relevant stakeholders for OA academic books, but will facilitate co-creation and validation events throughout the project to ensure that the views and voices of all relevant stakeholders are represented, promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion.This will assure maximal consensus and take-up of the recommendations.
- Start date: 1 January 2023
- End date: 31 December 2024
The Skills4EOSC project brings together leading experiences of national, regional, institutional, and thematic Open Science (OS) and Data Competence Centres from 18 European countries with the goal of unifying the current training landscape into a common and trusted pan-European ecosystem, in order to accelerate the upskilling of European researchers and data professionals in the field of FAIR and Open Data, intensive-data science and Scientific Data Management.
OPERAS will coordinate a work package about Open Science skills for Research Infrastructures and thematic communities, which is dedicated to the set up of Open Science training courses and learning paths within various communities. The Work Package (WP) will focus on social sciences and humanities, climate change, and earth science research communities, as well as on museums’ open collections and research infrastructures professionals’ specific needs. OPERAS will deal especially with the social sciences and humanities research communities and will establish recommendations about Open Science learning paths for these communities. Furthermore, OPERAS will contribute to the WP3 “OS training for evidence-based policy and public administration” and the WP8 “Synergies, stakeholder engagement, advocacy and communications”.
- Start date: 01 September 2022
- End date: 31 August 2025