The project OPERAS-PLUS has received 2,7 million EUR through Horizon Europe to support the further development of OPERAS in its preparatory phase and on its way towards implementation. OPERAS is the Research Infrastructure dedicated to support open scholarly communication for Social Sciences and Humanities in the European Research Area. The project officially kicked-off on September 1, 2022 and it will run for 36 months.
OPERAS was selected in 2021 as new infrastructure on the ESFRI Roadmap for the excellence of its scientific case and for its strategic importance for the European Research Area and the structuring of the European research infrastructure ecosystem.
The OPERAS-PLUS project will work towards 4 main objectives:
- develop and strengthen OPERAS governance structure, especially financial, legal, and human resource management aspects of the infrastructure central hub
- support the establishment and development of OPERAS national node
- develop OPERAS portfolio of service
- maximise OPERAS’ impact in the ERA and at international level by extending it beyond its current scope and onboarding new members and countries in the infrastructure.
DARIAH is one of the 13 consortium partners involved in the project, which is led by the Max Weber Foundation, and counts two associated partners from the United Kingdom. DARIAH will mainly contribute to the ongoing work on the evaluation framework for innovative outputs, by addressing their perceived prestige and the current evaluation mechanisms in academia.
“The project gives us a precious opportunity to continue our work on strengthening evaluation frameworks for born-digital research outputs in the Social Sciences and Humanities and reduce the tension between formal assessment criteria and the richness of digital scholarship” said Erzsébet Toth-Czifra, Open Science Officer in DARIAH-EU. “We are looking forward to working with scholars creating, curating and reusing these born-digital content types as they are the best-placed actors to assess what evaluation criteria are relevant to their communities.”
Read more on the project here.