OPERAS: Open Scholarly Communication in the European Research Area for Social Sciences and Humanities

The European landscape of scholarly communication in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) is currently patchy, fragmented and not organized enough to be efficient, particularly to address the challenge of transitioning to Open Science. This is due to several factors, such as the small size of resource providers, the historical underfunding and lack of sustainability in this area, the variety of technical skills and resources across the community. The nature of the SSH disciplines also adds specific challenges which are not correctly addressed at scales, such as the diversity of publication languages, the entrenchment in diverse cultural backgrounds and the need for specific forms of scholarly communication (monographs, critical editions, and edited bibliographies, amongst others).

OPERAS provides the research community with the missing brick it needs to find, access, create, edit, disseminate and easily and efficiently validate SSH outputs across Europe. In one word, OPERAS unlocks scholarly communication resources and enables the whole field to reinvent itself in the new Open Science paradigm.

Despite their diversity, OPERAS’ services are designed according to the same pattern that originates in its federating overall mission: they pool, aggregate, or federate existing resources from across Europe to deliver to European researchers a single access point from where they can benefit from the full range of the resources rather than being limited to the local ones. With the development of its services, OPERAS will build transnational access to scholarly communication resources available to researchers across the European Research Area and integrate its service into the EOSC marketplace as soon as they are ready.