Category Archives: oa.operas

OPERAS welcomes EU Council Conclusions ‘supporting diversity and ensuring equity in scholarly publishing’

Posted on by
Reply
EU Council May 23

The Council of the European Union adopted on May 23 conclusions on the ‘high quality, transparent, open, trustworthy and equitable scholarly publishing’, in which it calls for immediate and unrestricted Open Access in publishing research involving public funds (Council conclusion).

OPERAS welcomes this official positioning of the council on diversity and equity in publishing academic results and the emphasis on:

that immediate and unrestricted open access should be the norm in publishing research involving public funds, with transparent pricing commensurate with the publication services and where costs are not covered by individual authors or readers

(Council conclusion p. 5)

The OPERAS Research Infrastructure aims to make Open Science a reality for research in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) and achieve a scholarly communication system where knowledge produced in the SSH benefits researchers, academics, students and more generally the whole society across Europe and worldwide, without barriers.

To express our compliance with and pleasure about the conclusions we participate in a joint statement:

Open Science: stakeholders welcome European efforts towards publicly owned and not-for-profit scholarly communication

For European public research and innovation actors, scholarly knowledge is a public good. Publicly funded research and its results should be immediately and openly available to all without barriers such as subscription fees or paywalls. This is essential in driving knowledge forward, promoting innovation and tackling social issues.

Key representative organisations of the public research and innovation sector have welcomed today’s adoption of the ‘Council conclusions on high-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy, and equitable scholarly publishing’.

In a joint response, the signatories urge EU member states and institutions to continue their efforts towards a high-quality, transparent, open, trustworthy and equitable scholarly communication ecosystem, through stakeholder engagement, constructive dialogue with the public research and innovation sector, and with evidence-based reforms underpinned by the principles of open science.

Signatories include the European University Association (EUA), Science Europe, the Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER), the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities (ALLEA), the Association of ERC Grantees (AERG), the Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA), the European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers (Eurodoc), cOAlition S, OPERAS, and the French National Research Agency (ANR).

The public research and innovation sector is actively pursuing a not-for-profit scholarly communication ecosystem. Notable examples, among other initiatives, include: backing for not-for-profit open access publishing models (e.g. the Action Plan for Diamond Open Access); demand for more dependable and comparable data on the state of scholarly communication (e.g. the Journal Comparison Service); and emphasis on infrastructure development (e.g. OPERAS).

As such, the statement welcomes the Council of the EU’s encouragement of initiatives that align with the objective of developing a not-for-profit scholarly communication ecosystem and reiterates the signatories’ commitment to launch activities that will further engage their members in shaping the future of scholarly communication.

Joint statement

And OPERAS is especially delighted about the mentioning of Open Access books in the conclusions, a topic OPERAS has advocated for since its beginning:

ACKNOWLEDGES that publishing practices vary across disciplines, and EMPHASISES that some publication formats, such as monographs, books and long-text formats, especially in the social sciences and humanities, should continue to be supported, while promoting open access publishing and allowing for a diverse range of formats to co-exist, and for publishing in a range of languages

(Council conclusion p. 5)

The OPERAS Research Infrastructure develops services to directly support researchers, publishers, scholarly communication service providers and more on this path to publicly owned and not-for-profit scholarly communication. 

Besides the services catalogue OPERAS supports three EU-funded projects supporting community-driven pathways to equitable open scholarly publishing. OPERAS participates in CRAFT-OA and coordinates Diamas and PALOMERA. Despite their separate focus areas, together their efforts work towards a broad and common vision for a more open and equitable scholarly publishing ecosystem.

Join us on 20th June at 1 PM CEST to learn how three EU-funded projects – CRAFT-OA, DIAMAS, and PALOMERA – are working for an equitable future for scholarly communication, with academic communities at the centre.

In the webinar, you will be introduced to each project and their individual aims. Following this, the discussion will focus on how, despite their separate focus areas, their efforts work towards a broad and common vision for a more open and equitable scholarly publishing ecosystem.

CRAFT-OA empowers regional journal platforms and publishing service providers to upscale, professionalise, and reach stronger interoperability with other scientific information systems, by providing services and tools.

The DIAMAS project is developing common standards, guidelines and practices to build capacity for the Diamond publishing sector. Formulating recommendations of this kind aims to create a more sustainable future for Open Access Diamond Publishing in Europe.

PALOMERA has set out to provide actionable recommendations and concrete resources to support and coordinate aligned funder and institutional policies for Open Access books. Doing so involves assessing challenges and bottlenecks that currently slow the widespread implementation of Open Access book policy.

Advancing a publicly owned and not-for-profit scholarly communication ecosystem based on the principles of open science

Posted on by
Reply

“Joint response by the European University Association (EUA), Science Europe, Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER), European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities (ALLEA), Association of ERC Grantees (AERG), Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA), European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers (Eurodoc), cOAlition S, OPERAS, and French National Research Agency (ANR). We welcome the adoption by the Council of the European Union (EU) of the conclusions on highquality, transparent, open, trustworthy, and equitable scholarly publishing. As key public research and innovation actors in Europe, we are committed to supporting the development of a publicly owned, not-for-profit scholarly communication ecosystem in collaboration with policymakers in Europe and beyond….”

Job: Project manager | OPERAS

Posted on by
Reply

Job Summary

The Project Manager works closely with the Secretary General for the daily implementation and management of the OPERAS’ projects portfolio. The Project Manager will be primarily in charge of OPERAS’ coordinated projects and, on demand, support the coordination of OPERAS’ contribution to participated projects. The main tasks and responsibilities are centred around the day-to-day administration of the consortium, the monitoring of the resources, the development and implementation of the quality and risk management plans and consist of:

Leading preparation of the contractual documentation: grant agreement and consortium agreement;
Supporting the technical or scientific coordinator and the project boards (General Assembly, Project management boards), organising the meetings and writing minutes;
Implementing the consortium progress monitoring;
Coordinating, supervising and submitting the EU periodic reports (financial and technical);
Managing the project budget, distribution of the prefinancing, redistribution of budget in case of amendment;
Set up the necessary procedure for quality and risk management (only for coordinated projects);
Organising the EC review(s) in liaison with the project boards members;
Representing OPERAS vis à vis the EU project officer.

The Project Manager will also contribute to developing the project proposals and set up the Grant Agreement to launch project proposals granted. The Project Manager will be responsible for maintaining and evolving the project management processes as part of the Integrated Management System.

 

Collaborative models for OA book publishers (Version 2.0) | Zenodo

Posted on by
Reply

B?aszczy?ska, Marta, Melinš?ak Zlodi, Iva, Morka, Agata, Proudman, Vanessa, & Stone, Graham. (2023). Collaborative models for OA book publishers (Version 2.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7780754

Given the dynamic rate of change in the OA books business models landscape, the OPERAS Open Access Business Models Special Interest Group launched a survey in 2021 to 1) improve our understanding of the scholarly publishing landscape and of the challenges that publishers face in the context of publishing OA monographs; and 2) to identify main trends (including opportunities and challenges) and the knowledge of collaborative funding and infrastructure models in OA publishing in Social Science and the Humanities. This white paper updates and expands an earlier version published in 2021, which presented the preliminary analysis of the findings.

Despite a small sample of presses meaning that no strong trends ought to be discussed, several insights were drawn and should be considered important directions for the future. Key findings in the report have been grouped into three main areas: collaboration, funding, and support.

The report found that, although not opposed to the idea, a majority of presses do not engage in collaboration, specifically collaborative models for shared infrastructure, mainly due to the lack of knowledge and information, or perceived lack of need. This indicates that, for OA books, we are still at the early stage of the adoption curve for collaborative shared infrastructure.

In terms of funding, most publishers perceive themselves to be somewhat sustainable. For institutional publishers, parent organisations are crucial as providers of financial or non-monetary support of OA. In addition, most publishers stress the need to have more resources and rely on more than one funding source, including grants and subsidies.

The report found that awareness-raising and targeted support and training could be used to engage the presses but further incentivisation may be required to encourage publishers to collaborate more widely.

We believe that the insights from this white paper may be interesting to a number of projects, such as DIAMAS, OPERAS-PLUS, and Palomera and have presented areas for further research and more specific actionable points for these projects.

 

£5.8 million funding to significantly expand and accelerate COPIM open access infrastructures | Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM)

Posted on by
Reply

The Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs project (COPIM) is delighted that Arcadia and the Research England Development (RED) Fund are supporting a new initiative that will build on the pioneering work of the COPIM project.

The Open Book Futures project (OBF), led by Lancaster University, will significantly expand key infrastructures created by COPIM to achieve a step change in how community-owned Open Access (OA) book publishing is delivered.

Open Book Futures will follow the principles of ‘Scaling Small’ that guided the work of the COPIM project, further developing the infrastructures, business models, networks and resources that are needed to deliver a future for Open Access books led not by large commercial operations, but by communities of scholars, small-to-medium-sized publishers, not-for-profit infrastructure providers, and scholarly libraries.

Among its activities, OBF will deepen and accelerate the work of:

the recently launched Open Book Collective, which makes it easier for academic libraries to provide direct financial support to small- and medium-sized OA publishing initiatives;

the Thoth metadata management and dissemination platform;

the Opening the Future revenue model;

the forthcoming Experimental Publishing Compendium; 

the forthcoming Thoth Archiving Network.

Open Book Futures, which will run from 1 May 2023 to 30 April 2026, will increase COPIM’s long-term impact and ensure that a wide range of voices have the opportunity to shape the future of open access book publishing. In order to amplify bibliodiverse and equitable community-led approaches to OA book publishing, OBF aims not just to strengthen existing networks in the UK and North America, but also to engage further with publishers, universities, and infrastructure providers in a diverse set of national and linguistic contexts, including Africa, Australasia, Continental Europe, and Latin America.

With that in mind, OBF will reunite many of the COPIM project partners, including Birkbeck, University of London, Coventry University, Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), Jisc, Loughborough University, Open Book Collective (OBC), Open Book Publishers (OBP), punctum books, Thoth, and Trinity College, Cambridge University, and they will also be joined by a wide range of new partners including Continental Platform/University of Cape Town, the Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative (COKI), the Digital Preservation Coalition, the Educopia Institute, Knowledge Futures, Lyrasis, OPERAS, Public Knowledge Project (PKP), Research Libraries UK (RLUK), SciELO Books, Scottish Universities Press/SCURL, and SPARC Europe. The project is also supported by Lancaster University Library.

[…]

 

£5.8 million project to deliver a more sustainable future for Open Access books | Lancaster University

Posted on by
Reply

A new project that works to increase access to valuable research is to receive more than £5.8 million in funding.

Led by Lancaster University, the Open Book Futures (OBF) project will develop and support organisations, tools and practices that enable both academics and the wider public to make more and better use of books published on an Open Access basis. Open Access books can be accessed and used online free of charge.

In particular, the project, which is also supported by Lancaster University Library, aims to achieve a step change in how community-owned Open Access book publishing is delivered.

Funded by Arcadia and the Research England Development (RED) Fund, the project marks a shift in the ambition, scope and impact of community-owned Open Access book publishing.

It will significantly increase and improve the quantity, discoverability, preservation and accessibility of academic content freely and easily available to all.

This will be done by building the infrastructures, business models, networks and resources that are needed to deliver a future for Open Access books led not by large commercial operations but by communities of scholars, small-to-medium-sized publishers, not-for-profit infrastructure providers, and scholarly libraries.

This includes expanding the work of the recently launched Open Book Collective, which makes it easier for academic libraries to provide direct financial support to Open Access publishing initiatives, as well as the Thoth metadata management platform, the Opening the Future revenue model and the forthcoming Experimental Publishing Compendium.

Open Book Futures, due to start on May 1st, builds on the pioneering work of the Community-Led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project. COPIM, a strategic international partnership led by Coventry University, began the work of establishing the key open, community-led solutions required to address the barriers to the wider impact of Open Access books.

[…]

 

Open Chat Series: How to Advocate for Innovative Open Access Book Publishing? 29 March 2023 from 11:30-12:30 CEST | OPERAS

Posted on by
Reply

How-to-Advocacy  

An Open Chat Series by the OPERAS Special Interest Group (SIG) “Advocacy”

Do the humanities and social sciences need (more) advocacy?

Why is advocacy crucial for forging open scholarly communication?

What can you do for more openness in the humanities and social sciences?

OPERAS Advocacy Special Interest Group opens up Open Chat Series. With experts in advocacy and communications, researchers, publishers and other members of the social sciences and humanities community we will:

discuss current trends in open scholarly communication,
look for innovative solutions and tools for publishers, researchers and scholarly institutions,
share best practices in open digital scholarly publications.

On 29 March 2023 from 11:30-12:30 CEST we will continue our Open Chat Series “How-to-Advocacy” and start a chat with Lucy Barnes from the Open Access Books Network. Together with our guest speaker and the audience, we will discuss the advocacy goals and challenges for the social sciences and humanities community – and how to advocate for innovative Open Access book publishing. The discussion will be moderated by the OPERAS Special Interest Group “Advocacy”.

 

Roundtable on Diamond OA and Multilingualism, March 28, 2023, 13:00-14:45 CET | Responsible Research @ The Federation of Finnish Learned Societies

Posted on by
Reply

OPERAS and Helsinki Initiative organize a Roundtable on Diamond OA and Multilingualism 14:00-15:45 (13:00-14:45 CET).

14:00-14:10 Opening (Janne Pölönen, TSV) and presentation of onsite participants
14:10-14:50 Keynote by Pierre Mounier on Diamond Open Access infrastructure (+ immediate Q&A on the presentation)
14:50-15:45 Roundtable discussion including Pierre and Finnish OA scholarly publishing, communication and funding experts and stakeholders, with comments (5-7 mins) by

Sami Niinimäki (Ministry of Education and Culture)
Pirjo Hiidenmaa (Professor of Non-fiction Studies and Non-fiction Writing, University of Helsinki)
Pekka Olsbo (FUN Finnish University Libraries’ Network, University of Jyväskylä)
Petja Kauppi (Elore – Journal of the Finnish Folklore Society)
Mikael Laakso (Finnish Association for Scholarly Publishing, Hanken school of Economics)

On site participation at Tieteiden talo by invitation only (inquiries by email janne.polonen@tsv.fi).

Online participation on Zoom: https://tsv-fi.zoom.us/j/88996643682?pwd=UlNwOTF4dEhUMUdFRitXTjVrc0ptUT09

Pierre Mounier is deputy director of OpenEdition, a comprehensive infrastructure based in France for open access publication and communication in the humanities and social sciences. OpenEdition offers several platforms for journals, scientific announcements, academic blogs, and, finally, books, in different languages and from different countries. Pierre Mounier is also one of the coordinators of OPËRAS, the european infrastructure for open scholarly communication in the social sciences and the humanities and is, with Eelco Ferwerda, co-director of the Directory of Open Access Books.

OPERAS (open scholarly communication in the European research area for social sciences and humanities) is the European Research Infrastructure for the development of open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities.

Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism in Scholarly Communication aims to encourage sharing research results beyond academia, support the national publication channels that enable multilingual publication, and promote multilingualism in the assessment and funding processes of research.

 

Engage with PALOMERA via the OABN! Launch event March 28, 2023, 4pm (CEST) | Open Access Books Network

Posted on by
Reply

The Open Access Books Network (OABN) is working with the PALOMERA project, a two-year initiative funded by HORIZON Europe that seeks to investigate why so few Open Access (OA) funder policies include OA books, and to provide actionable recommendations to change this.

We will be hosting a PALOMERA Series of events that will provide a forum for anyone interested in open access book publishing to:

engage with PALOMERA via the OABN, 
contribute your knowledge and expertise as the project progresses, 
offer feedback to help shape PALOMERA’s outputs and recommendations. 

We want to gather a broad group of representatives from different stakeholders in open access book publishing, as we did for our Voices from the OA Book Community workshop series in 2021, and enable you to contribute to the PALOMERA project via the PALOMERA Series.

Launch event

We will host a launch event on Tuesday 28 March at 3pm BST / 4pm CEST where you will hear from some of the project’s leaders, including Niels Stern (OAPEN/DOAB) and Ursula Rabar (OPERAS/OAeBU). You will have the opportunity to ask questions about the project and to let us know the best ways for you to engage with PALOMERA. The event will also be recorded.

Sign up for the launch event: it’s free and everyone is welcome! 

Please also share the link with anyone who might be interested.

 

Open Access Business Models – OPERAS

Posted on by
Reply

“The Open Access Business Models Special Interest Group looks into business models currently used by open access publishers, with a particular focus on the situation of European publishers in the social sciences and humanities (SSH), especially journals and monographs, in light of the Plan S guidelines. …

OA Business Models White Paper (2018) …

 

Collaborative models for OA book publishers, Version 1 (2021) …”

 

Craft OA: EU-Projekt zur Förderung von Diamond Open Access (EU project to foster uptake of Diamond OA) | OPERAS-GER

Posted on by
Reply

engl. version via deepl.com

    OPERAS is a consortium partner of the EU project “Creating a Robust Accessible Federated Technology for Open Access”, short: CRAFT-OA, which started in January 2023. The project with a total of 23 partners in 14 European countries is funded by the European Commission for three years with 4.8 million euros. The project is led by the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen / Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen (SUB Göttingen).

    CRAFT-OA aims to strengthen and further develop institutional publishing in the Diamond Open Access model throughout Europe. The Diamond Open Access model means that researchers do not have to pay for the publication of scientific publications and readers do not have to pay for access to them. The special feature of CRAFT-OA is its focus on journal publishing. For this purpose, services and tools are to be developed that will enable local and regional platforms and service providers to expand their content, services and also platforms and thus achieve stronger networking with other information systems in science. For scientists in the institutional Diamond Open Access area, this means easier work.

German original:

OPERAS ist Konsortiumspartner des im Januar 2023 gestarteten EU-Projekts „Creating a Robust Accessible Federated Technology for Open Access“, kurz: CRAFT-OA. Das Projekt mit insgesamt 23 Partnern in 14 europäischen Ländern wird von der Europäischen Kommission drei Jahre lang mit 4,8 Millionen Euro gefördert. Die Leitung liegt bei der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen / Niedersächsischen Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen (SUB Göttingen).

CRAFT-OA hat das Ziel, europaweit das institutionelle Publikationswesen im Diamond Open Access-Modell zu stärken und weiterzuentwickeln. Unter dem Diamond Open Access-Modell versteht man, dass sowohl die Forschenden für die Veröffentlichung von als auch die Lesenden für den Zugriff auf wissenschaftliche Publikationen keine Gebühren zahlen müssen. Das Besondere an CRAFT-OA ist hierbei die Spezialisierung auf das Journalpublizieren. Hierfür sollen Services und Werkzeuge entwickelt werden, die es lokalen und regionalen Plattformen und Serviceanbietern ermöglichen, ihre Inhalte, Services und auch Plattformen zu erweitern und somit eine stärkere Vernetzung mit anderen Informationssystemen in der Wissenschaft zu erreichen. Für Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler im institutionellen Diamond Open Access-Bereich bedeutet dies ein erleichtertes Arbeiten.

 

“Creating a Robust Accessible Federated Technology for Open Access” (CRAFT-OA): European Commission grants substantial funding to improve institutional publishing for science

Posted on by
Reply
CRAFT-OA launch

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 will start in January 2023 and run for 36 months. Funded within the Horizon Europe Framework Programme (HORIZON Europe), 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.

Margo Bargheer, CRAFT-OA Coordinator, University of Göttingen:

There are countless engaged open access journals out there, making a point to offer Diamond Open Access options to their communities. With our project, they will benefit from shared developments and shared services, but most of all from shared knowledge around professional institutional publishing and stronger networks to reach resilience within their own operation.

EU-Projects support scholarly publishing

CRAFT-OA is linked with other European projects supporting Diamond Open Access, especially the 3-years DIAMAS project (Developing Institutional Open Access Publishing Models to Advance Scholarly Communication). As CRAFT-OA mainly supports Diamond Open Access publishing by providing a technology update, the DIAMAS project supports Diamond Open Access on a non-technical level by building up a capacity centre and a community. The PALOMERA project (Policy Alignment of Open Access Monographs in the European Research Area) investigates institutional scholarly communication as well. Still, it concentrates on contrary to journals on books and especially policies for books. It launches in January 2023 and will run for two years.

Consortium and skills

CRAFT-OA’s 23 consortium partners from 14 European countries are all engaged in institutional publishing and infrastructure, and committed to sustaining and developing capacities in the field. A wide variety of skills and expertise is represented via the consortium partners participating in the project: 

For more information please contact the coordinator Margo Bargheer, bargheer[a]sub.uni-goettingen.de

EU Funding

Open Call: Machine translation evaluation in the context of scholarly communication (proposals invited by Dec 23, 2022) | OPERAS

Posted on by
Reply

In 2020, the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research (MESR) launched the Translations and Open Science project with the aim to explore the opportunities offered by translation technologies to foster multilingualism in scholarly communication and thus help to remove language barriers according to Open Science principles.

During the initial phase of the project (2020), 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.

Once developed, the scientific translation service is intended to:

address the needs of different users, including researchers (authors and readers), readers outside the academic community, publishers of scientific texts, dissemination platforms or open archives;
combine specialised language technologies and human skills, in particular adapted machine translation engines and in-domain language resources to support the translation process;
be founded on the principles of open science, hence based on open-source software as well as shareable resources, and used to produce open access translations.

Project Goals

In order to follow up on recommendations and lay the foundation of the translation service, the OPERAS Research Infrastructure was commissioned by the MESR to coordinate a series of preparatory studies in the following areas:

Mapping and collection of scientific bilingual corpora: identifying and defining the conditions for collecting and preparing corpora of bilingual scientific texts which will serve as training dataset for specialised translation engines, source data for terminology extraction, and translation memory creation.
Use case study for a technology-based scientific translation service: drafting an overview of the current translation practices in scholarly communication and defining the use cases of a technology-based scientific translation service (associated features, expected quality, editorial and technical workflows, and involved human experts).
Machine translation evaluation in the context of scholarly communication: evaluating a set of translation engines to translate specialised texts.
Roadmap and budget projections: making budget projections to anticipate the costs to develop and run the service.

The four preparatory studies are planned during a one-year period as of September 2022. 

The present call for tenders only covers the (3) Machine translation evaluation in the context of scholarly communication.

Kick off for newly funded project: OPERAS-PLUS | DARIAH

Posted on by
Reply

The project OPERAS-PLUS has received 2,7 million EUR through Horizon Europe to support the further development of OPERAS in its preparatory phase and on its way towards implementation. OPERAS is the Research Infrastructure dedicated to support open scholarly communication for Social Sciences and Humanities in the European Research Area. The project officially kicked-off on September 1, 2022 and it will run for 36 months.

OPERAS was selected in 2021 as new infrastructure on the ESFRI Roadmap for the excellence of its scientific case and for its strategic importance for the European Research Area and the structuring of the European research infrastructure ecosystem.

The OPERAS-PLUS project will work towards 4 main objectives:

develop and strengthen OPERAS governance structure, especially financial, legal, and human resource management aspects of the infrastructure central hub
support the establishment and development of OPERAS national node
develop OPERAS portfolio of service
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.

DARIAH is one of the 13 consortium partners involved in the project, which is led by the Max Weber Foundation, and counts two associated partners from the United Kingdom. DARIAH will mainly contribute to the ongoing work on the evaluation framework for innovative outputs, by addressing their perceived prestige and the current evaluation mechanisms in academia.