OPERAS's annual report: innovative services and publications are highlights from 2021
In addition to six services in various stages of development, the OPERAS infrastructure, integrated by UC, published more than 100 new documents last year
To coordinate and federate resources in Europe to respond effectively to the communication needs of scholars in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH): this is the mission of the European Research Infrastructure OPERAS, whose Executive Assembly is integrated by the UC. The infrastructure has just released its annual report for 2021, during its General Assembly and Executive Assembly, held last 22 June in Brussels.
In the list of activities and services under development last year, the infrastructure had six services at various levels of development. One of the most important achievements of 2021 was the delivery of the Beta version of the GoTriple platform, which is part of the TRIPLE project (2019-2023), also integrated by UC. The platform is focused on the Social Sciences and Humanities and had its first version launched in October 2021, with its main functionalities and its design architecture.
Six million items - currently publications - have already been ingested in this first phase. The publications can be found in nine different languages through the use of keywords. Other functionalities in the Beta release are:
- The search by publications and authors;
- The filtering of results by publication type, author, year and discipline;
- The access to the original page of the document to download the available items.
In addition, GoTriple already has part of the innovative services planned for its full launch in 2023. Among those available now, there are: the Visual Discovery System, which allows for instant visualization of research results and analysis of research trends; a first version of the Recommendation System, which currently provides users with personalized recommendations on publications related to their previous research; and integration with the OPERAS crowdfunding channel. For the full launch of the platform, the Trust Building System and the Web Document Annotation System will be additionally integrated.
European integration, local empowerment
"Making Open Science a reality for research in the Social Sciences and Humanities" is the motto of OPERAS, which operates from a European, transnational perspective. The research infrastructure has undertaken efforts to, on the one hand, build partnerships at an international level and, on the other hand, to strengthen national and smaller-scale ties. In this sense, an important highlight of 2021 was the launch of the OPERAS national nodes. Six events to launch national nodes were held in 2021. In 2022, the community is strengthening the existing communities and preparing the creation of new ones, including in Portugal.
In terms of European integration, in addition to being included in the ESFRI Roadmap in 2021, OPERAS became a full member of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Association. In addition, the infrastructure has entered into collaborations with other organisations at the European level, such as OpenAIRE, EGI and Coalition S.
Clarifying the way for open science in SSH: publications and initiatives
More than 100 documents from the OPERAS community were published on the Zenodo platform in 2021, including publications and reports that help to understand the ecosystem of Open Science in SSH in Europe. Highlights include the study of the ecosystem of Open Access books and libraries in Europe; the report "Future of Scholarly Communication", which brings analysis and recommendations on strategic areas such as multilingualism, FAIR data, quality assessment and the future of scholarly writing; and the multi-institutional study on diamond journals (Diamond OA Journals).
To enable continuous scientific production on topics dear to its community, OPERAS maintains a set of special interest groups that have been publishing a series of reports since 2018. The most recent versions of the white papers from these groups are available as Living Books, online, to be not only read but commented on and continuously improved with the help of the community.
Another initiative dedicated to informing and collaborating on good practices in one of the hottest topics in Open Science is the blog, created in 2021, "The Road to FAIR". The blog aims to contribute to FAIRification in the area of Social Sciences and Humanities by affecting the communicational culture in the area, sharing standards and good practices, and leveraging already existing infrastructures and services. In addition to the blog, an article on the FAIRification of publishing services, based on a methodology from OpenEdition (an OPERAS' member) has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Electronic Publishing.
The article describes the main components of a methodology used by OpenEdition, which consisted of different steps leading to the adaptation of FAIR principles to the specific publishing context and resulted in a set of recommendations. The article shows a generic framework that can be extracted and reused by other publishing services. It is a preliminary step in the development of a toolkit for FAIRification of publishing services, a project to be undertaken by OPERAS in the near future. A pre-print version of the paper can be read at this link: FAIRifying a scholarly publishing service - Methodology based on the OpenEdition's internal FAIR audit.
| Learn more |
- Read the complete OPERAS 2021 annual report
- Want to join the community? Learn more: https://www.operas-eu.org/about/want-to-know-more/want-to-join-operas/
- If you want to know how to join the OPERAS national node in Portugal, send an email to openscience@uc.pt.