DARIAH and OPERAS Join Forces to Make Open Science a Reality in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences

DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities) is a European research infrastructure supported jointly by a consortium of 18 member countries. Its mission is to empower research communities in the arts and humanities with digital methods to create, connect and share knowledge about culture and society. DARIAH’s work focuses on building a humanities-friendly component of the European Open Science Cloud for tools, services and data; developing and sustaining training materials and resources in Digital Humanities; enabling and encouraging interdisciplinary research around emergent research themes; advocating for humanities researchers in European policy fora. 

OPERAS is the European research infrastructure for the development of open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities (SSH). Its main goal is to coordinate and pool university-led scholarly ­communication activities in Europe in the social sciences and humanities, in view of enabling open science as the standard practice. OPERAS currently counts 40 members from 16 countries and is led by a Core Group of 9 institutions.

In the last few years, DARIAH and OPERAS have been collaborating in different projects and initiatives:

• HIRMEOS (High Integration for Research Monographs in the European Open Science infrastructure) was a H2020 project to develop innovative services on top of five open access book dissemination platforms across Europe.
• Open Methods, a platform, developed as an initiative of DARIAH in cooperation with OPERAS, highlighting curated content about Digital Humanities Methods and Tools.

Based on this tradition, the collaboration between DARIAH and OPERAS has given birth to new areas:

• Triple (Transforming Research through Innovative Practices for Linked interdisciplinary Exploration) project, founded by the European Commission (EC) in the H2020 framework, which aims to develop the Triple platform, a European discovery solution that will enable researchers to discover and reuse SSH data, but also other researchers and projects across disciplines and language as part of the European Open Science Cloud.
• OPERAS-P, another EC funded project, which will support the development of OPERAS, the European Research infrastructure for open scholarly communication in the Social Sciences and Humanities. 
• The GO-FAIR Collaboration and Implementation Network CO-OPERAS which aims to bring FAIR data principles (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable) in the SSH research area. 

In this long tradition of collaboration, DARIAH and OPERAS have been working towards supporting and promoting open science, bringing data management and researcher support on one side, publication management and publisher support on the other. Their work has been complementary in advancing Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences research towards Open Science. DARIAH is focusing on guiding and training researchers in terms of data management practices, copyrights and publishing, and providing practical recommendations to promote Open Access within the arts and humanities. OPERAS is focusing on providing better scholarly communication tools and services to researchers when it comes to discovering, writing, sharing, reviewing, editing and disseminating research outputs in the humanities and the social sciences. They combine their strengths and share human resources.

In the light of the above, DARIAH and OPERAS confirm the value of working together to support researchers on the one hand to smoothly transit towards Open Science practices, and to shape a more inclusive and sustainable scholarly publication ecosystem on the other. OPERAS is working to establish itself under a legal entity known as an International Non-Profit Organization (AISBL) incorporated in Brussels. DARIAH ERIC will support the future AISBL and be part of its governance so as to further extend and deepen the productive cooperation between the organisations.