CEON/CEES joins the OPERAS Research Infrastructure
The Centre for Evaluation in Education and Science (CEON/CEES) has joined the OPERAS research infrastructure as the first OPERAS member from Serbia.
OPERAS is the European Research Infrastructure dedicated to the development of open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities (SSH). It seeks to develop a decentralized pan-European infrastructure in SSH resting on the principles of open science, bibliodiversity and multilingualism by integrating and coordinating already existing platforms and services, developing common standards and ensuring interoperability. OPERAS currently has more than 40 members based across Europe, as well as in Latin America and Canada.
The idea of the OPERAS research infrastructure was first presented at the OASPA Conference in 2015 in Amsterdam. It was further developed through two Horizon 2020 projects OPERAS-D and Hirmeos. Current projects include OPERAS-P and TRIPLE. At the 2018 International Conference on Research Infrastructures (ICRI), ESFRI identified OPERAS’ field of action as “high strategic potential area”. OPERAS is currently preparing an application to ESFRI Roadmap. Late in 2019, the Core members of the OPERAS Research Infrastructure jointly founded an international association, which enables OPERAS to act as a legal entity.
One of the premises of the OPERAS network is that the specific issues relating to scholarly communication in SSH, such as the diversity research outputs, the relative prevalence of monographs, and research evaluation, are not adequately addressed in current research policies. Accordingly, OPERAS seeks to develop specific tools for the dissemination of research outputs in SSH and semantic tools that would help increase the discoverability of multilingual content, integrate Open Access monographs into the open science ecosystem, contribute to the development of innovative business models in OA publishing and the alternative metrics and criteria for the evaluation of research outputs in SSH. Through the development of common standards, OPERAS seeks to enable the integration of services into the European Open Science Cloud.
The OPERAS network and CEON/CEES share many interests and focuses, such as the striving to develop sustainable non-APC Open Access publishing platforms, interoperability on multiple levels, fostering multilingualism, developing sustainable metrics and promoting high publishing standards. By joining the OPERAS network, CEON/CEES expects to improve the discoverability of local journals in SSH, to take part in the development of common publishing standards, and share with an international community the innovative practices and workflows developed in the local context.
CEON/CEES participates in the Special Interest Group Common Standard and will also contribute to the Special Interest Group Tools R&D and the Special Interest Group Best Practices.
Further reading:
OPERAS website: https://operas.hypotheses.org/
OPERAS Design Study: https://operas.hypotheses.org/design-study
