OPERAS

OPERAS is the Research Infrastructure supporting open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in the European Research Area. Its mission is to coordinate and federate resources in Europe to efficiently address the scholarly communication needs of European researchers in the field of SSH. OPERAS’ aim is to make Open Science a reality for research in the 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.

What is the OPERAS community

OPERAS community gathers researchers, universities, publishers, and infrastructures of the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) area aiming at building together a comprehensive and functional environment for the open scholarly communication. Convinced that scholarly communication, from the traditional publication to more innovative communication objects and tools, is at the heart of research, the community organized itself to address specific challenges. SSH community offers a scattered landscape, divided in many disciplines, strongly connected to national or local networks, using a high diversity of languages. The community’s outputs can, therefore, hardly use the global pathways to reach high visibility, which is generally dependent on the use of English, the dissemination through journals with high impact-factor. To address these challenges, the community needs support to share good practices and knowledge about standardization that will increase its integration in the global digital environment. It also needs appropriate infrastructures taking into account its specificities, like for instance multilingualism or domain vocabularies.

SSHOC Insight

The main impact of SSHOC achievements concernes the OPERAS project TRIPLE, dedicated to the creation of a discovery platform for the Social Sciences and Humanities: the GoTriple platform. GoTriple indexed publications and datasets and it made use of data catalogs created within SSHOC, like for instance the data collections from CESSDA and CLARIN.Community Members.