OPERAS Projects
The OPERAS distributed research infrastructure is supported by two running projects, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation prorgramme. Two funded projects are already completed.
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 COESO project (Collaborative Engagement on Societal Issues) kicked off on 19-20 January 2021 (https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101006325). The 3-year participatory research project, funded by the European Commission through a Science with and for Society grant, and supported by the OPERAS research infrastructure, will serve as a meeting point between various European communities: the social sciences and humanities community, the citizen science community, as well as the open scholarly communication community. At the heart of the project are ten citizen science pilots, representing a variety of social sciences and arts disciplines, societal challenges and types of engagement with citizens in different European countries. They address specific societal issues: mass tourism, education and gender, resilient societies, fight against crime, societal changes and migrations.
- Start date: 01 January 2021
- End date: 31 December 2023
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
OAeBU
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
The Translations and Open Science project, led by OPERAS and funded by the French National Fund for Open Science, explores translation as one of the possible ways to disseminate research results in different languages. The project has a special focus on translation technology that can be used to optimise and mutualise translation processes, resources and tools.
Following one of the commitments of the National Plan for Open Science of the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research, the project was launched in 2020. During the initial phase, a first working group, made up of experts in natural language processing and translation, published a report suggesting recommendations and avenues for experimentation with a view to establishing a scientific translation service combining relevant technologies, resources and human skills. The service will be available for different users and scenarios: researchers in need of support to write or translate scientific content in a language which is not their mother tongue, publishers that would like to translate scientific publications, readers who would like to submit a translation suggestion for a scientific paper, etc.
In order to follow up on the report published in 2020 and lay the foundation of the translation service, OPERAS welcomed the proposal to coordinate a preparatory phase consisting of a series of studies in the following areas:
- Mapping and collection of scientific bilingual corpora
- Use case study for a technology-based scientific translation service
- Machine translation evaluation in the context of scholarly communication
- Roadmap and budget projections for a technology-based scientific translation service.
OPERAS Past Projects
The TRIPLE project was launched in October 2019 and finished on March 2023. The project was financed under the Horizon 2020 framework with approx. 5.6 million Euros for a duration of 42 months. At the heart of the project is the development of the GoTriple platform, an innovative multilingual and multicultural discovery solution that provides a single access point for users to discover and reuse open scholarly SSH resources, i.e. research data and publications and to connect with other researchers.
The consortium worked in close cooperation with other European infrastructures, in particular CESSDA, CLARIN, DARIAH and EGI. The project produced a report on user needs. Then, TRIPLE worked on co-designing and user research on its innovation, exploitation and sustainability strategy.
After and in parallel to the acquisition and categorization of data, integration and the building of the GoTriple platform took place. The project’s final goal was to integrate the discovery solution into the EOSC marketplace.
The OPERAS-P project supported OPERAS, furthering the development of the infrastructure in view of achieving the necessary scientific, technical and community maturity. The project gathers 16 partners from 9 different countries and run from July 2019 to June 2021. It was successfully launched in October 2019 in Warsaw.
The OPERAS-D (Design) project supports the 9 main partners (“core group”) of the OPERAS network in the development of a European e-infrastructure for open access publications in the SSH. The project addresses long-term requirements for the development of the e-infrastructure and community building, as well as seeks to expand other interested parties within and beyond Europe, and in diverse fields of the SSH. As a key objective, the OPERAS-D project has prepared a design study that defines governance models, scientific and technical concepts for future services that the infrastructure will provide, and has establishes a roadmap to achieve these goals according to the requirements for long term sustainability. OPERAS-D engages the current and future partners in the OPERAS network to strengthen the community and develop the network of partners participating in OPERAS across Europe, specifically in central European countries.
HIRMEOS (High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science infrastructure)focuses on the monograph as a significant mode of scholarly communication in the SSH and tackles the main obstacles of the full integration of publishing platforms supporting open access monographs. The project improves 5 Open Access books publishing platforms (OpenEdition Books, OAPEN Library, EKT Open Book Press, Ubiquity Press, Göttingen University Press), enhancing their technical capacities and services, rendering technologies and content interoperable and embedding them fully into the European Open Science Cloud. HIRMEOS prototypesinnovative services by providing additional data, links and interactions to the documents, paving the way to potential tools for research assessment, which is still a major challenge in the SSH. The platforms participating are enriched with tools that enable identification, authentication and interoperability, and tools that enrich information and entity extraction, the ability to annotate monographs, and gather usage and alternative metric data. HIRMEOS also enriches the technical capacities of the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), a most significant indexing service for open access monographs globally, to receive automated infromation for ingestion, while it also develops a structured certification system to document monograph peer-review.