“The Future of Scholarly Communication” workshop was organised as a part of OPERAS Innovation Lab, which aims to facilitate communication and knowledge exchange within a field of digital humanities. The OPERAS Innovation Lab is led by IBL PAN, a partner in the OPERAS-P consortium and Executive Assembly member.

The main task of OPERAS Innovation Lab is to conduct user research in order to define the actual needs of the community with regards to open scholarly communication. Another important task is also analysing the existing innovative solutions in this field. These activities allow to improve, prepare – and sometimes prototype – services that respond to the needs of the community. 

The activities of the OPERAS Innovation Lab officially started within the WP6 “Innovation” in the OPERAS-P project. See the main findings and recommendations for stakeholders involved in scholarly communication in the final report “Future of Scholarly Communication. Forging an inclusive and innovative research infrastructure for scholarly communication in Social Sciences and Humanities” (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4922512) and in detailed task reports openly published on Zenodo. 

To further discuss and develop the future of scholarly communication, the OPERAS-P virtual workshop, “The Future of Scholarly Communication,” was held on February 24th–26th. During the three days of seminars, 341 participants discussed digital transformation challenges in humanities and social sciences (SSH).

The seminars were linked to a question: How can we effectively develop digital tools in order to apply novel research approaches, build interdisciplinary collaboration, raise the prestige of Open Access contributions and disseminate them outside academia? 

On each day two seminars were held. The two workshops on the first day were devoted to governance and business models. The panelists and participants discussed how new models of governance should embrace cultural and language diversity of research teams in SSH. They brought up the issue of institutional hierarchy within academia as opposed to more horizontal models specific for projects in digital humanities. The second panel concerned business models and publishing practices for academic books and monographs – an underdeveloped area of Open Access. 

On the second day, participants delved into bibliodiversity and multilingualism in SSH. In SSH disciplines, language is not only a tool but also an object of research. Using native languages is often crucial for these disciplines to achieve meaningful impact in local communities. Panelists debated  how digital tools should address this need and facilitate multilingual research and collaboration. The next panel was dedicated to processing academic publications as research data according to the FAIR principles (making them findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable). 

On the last day, panelists discussed the future of scholarly writing: publishing practices and scholars’ needs in the time of Open Access development. The starting point was a case study analysis of tools, services and digital projects enriched with interviews with researchers, librarians and publishers. The last panel was devoted to evaluation and assessment of academic writing. Its purpose was to exchange ideas for new models of evaluation that will take into account various types of academic achievements, such as monographs or digital editions and projects. 

“The Future of Scholarly Communication” workshop was organised as a part of OPERAS Innovation Lab, which aims to facilitate communication and knowledge exchange within a field of digital humanities. The OPERAS Innovation Lab is led by IBL PAN, a partner in the OPERAS Consortium.

You may find presentations from the seminars published here and the results were summed up in the report.

A short overview on the OPERAS Innovation Lab is given in this video presentation:

Maciej Maryl, Director, Digital Humanities Centre, IBL PAN” and Marta Blaszczynska, Coordinator, Digital Humanities Centre, IBL PAN” present the OPERAS Innovation Lab coordinated by the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL PAN)! #OPERASLab