OPERAS: bringing the long tail of Social Sciences and Humanities into Open Science

Abstract

Watch the VIDEO.The talk will present OPERAS, a comprehensive infrastructure aimed at providing a pan-European infrastructure to rethink and reshape publishing, discovery and dissemination addressing the specificity and the critical issues of Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH).OPERAS' aim is to meet the specific needs of SSH scholars in an open environment, taking care of all the steps of the scholarly communication cycle.OPERAS' unique approach is to unite researchers, libraries and publishers in a common effort, in order to take back control over scholarly communication. Not merging nor replacing, but nurturing existing realities, OPERAS provides innovative services to bring SSH into Open Science.OPERAS is designed to elaborate effective and scalable long-term strategies for the future development of the digital infrastructure and community building needed to innovate scholarly communication in the SSH. OPERAS' pervading idea of science as communication holds an immense potential for an inspiring model of Open Science with direct societal impact, based on continuous communication.

The Epistemic Cultures of the Digital Humanities and Their Relation to Open Science: Contributions to the Open Humanities Discourse

“…Regarding the characteristics of their forms of scholarly communication, the prevailing medium continues to be the monograph and book chapters, which, by itself, take more time to produce and distribute, and also have more costs associated. They also display certain specificities concerning their epistemology, workflow, collaboration, and argumentation, maintaining a close connection with the local context (Cronin, 2003;Giglia, 2019;Knöchelmann, 2019;Maryl et al, 2020). It is, for this reason, their communication is often directed to specific geographic areas and cultural situations, and, therefore, in the native languages of the context in which the research is produced, instead of what is seen in the areas of the hard sciences, in which English is considered the lingua franca.…”

“…Still, although with a divergent and disruptive character, with a tendency to adopt innovative digital tools, when it comes to scholarly communication practices, DH tend to be similar to those of the "traditional" humanities (Weel & Praal, 2020). Monographs still weigh heavily in the scholarly communication of the DH (Giglia, 2019;Knöchelmann, 2019). This has to do with the four functions of scholarly publishing -registration, certification, dissemination, and archiving -and the system of scientific evaluation and recognition, both of which are very much rooted in the print paradigm (Weel & Praal, 2020).…”

The case for an inclusive scholarly communication infrastructure for social sciences and humanities

“…This means that dissemination should no longer be perceived as the final stage of a research process, running somewhat separately from the actual research, but should be treated as an integral part of all scholarly activities (cf. Giglia, 2019 ; Nielsen, 2013 ).…”

“…The picture that emerges from these studies shows a rapidly changing communication landscape to which scholars are trying to adapt. Giglia points out that the changing idea of the “scholarly record,” which now also encompasses materials generated in the process, results in the emergence of a more liquid output and blurs the roles of the different actors in scholarly communication ( Giglia, 2019 , 142). Currently, sharing practices involve not only concluded research and published outputs but also the byproducts and beta-results of the research process.…”

JLSC Board Editorial 2019

“…The humanities are, to use the word of Micah Vandegrift (2019), "weird." They do not particularly care about journal impact factors, and they have community-owned infrastructures in place (such as OPERAS) (Giglia, 2019). So they don't need their best and brightest to negotiate transformative deals, but can let them focus on developing a sustainable scholarly communication system instead.…”