Reviewathon for OPERAS Living Book

The OPERAS Living Book has been updated, and the OPERAS community is invited and encouraged to participate in a post-publication Open Peer Review: the “Reviewathon”. The open annotations generated during our Reviewathon will further enrich discussions generated by the white papers and will be accomplished through the use of the Pundit tool. The Reviewathon will take place between December 2021 and January 2022, and a summary of the review process will be published as a blog post in early 2022. OPERAS invites you to take part and review the living book.

The OPERAS Living Book 

As a collection of white papers written by the OPERAS Special Interest Groups, the OPERAS Living Book constitutes the practical and theoretical pillars of the OPERAS infrastructure development. A first version published in 2018, the white papers have been individually viewed almost 8,500 times with around 4,500 downloads — indicating their strong relevance for the community. Although these original papers provided a reliable overview of the state of the art, the three years that have since passed have seen significant shifts in scholarly communication practices. The newly published 2021 versions are revised and updated to reflect these changes and to help navigate through the ever-evolving Open Access landscape. Please find the link to the Living Book here and share your ideas.

Below are brief teasers of each white paper — to spark your curiosity and entice you to participate in the Open Peer Review process.

Advocacy White Paper: 

Directed at publishers, publication platforms, libraries, and infrastructure providers and other interested parties.

• Recommends concrete actions and projects for addressing researchers’ needs and concerns related to Open Access publishing. 
• Suggests practices for creating user-friendly publishing procedures at a national level, presenting the case study of the German national node (OPERAS-GER) for OPERAS. 
• Delves into how to strategize advocacy efforts simultaneously at national and European levels, specifically related to the social sciences and humanities — drawing from a panel discussion at the 2020 OPERAS conference. 

While the 2018 white paper ultimately focused on advocacy targeting researchers at different career stages, the 2021 version widens the scope to include policy- and decision-makers, both at a national and European level.

Common Standards and FAIR principles White Paper:

Explores the workflows, mediums and technical standards that have emerged as a result of the changes brought about by the transition to Open Science.

• Presents recent developments in realizing the transition towards the Open Science paradigm 
• Discusses technical and operational standards for digital research infrastructures and service providers 
• Outlines the FAIR principles
• Highlights recent contributions of OPERAS in promoting common standards and proposes some orientations for future work for the SIG. 

Multilingualism White Paper: 

The Multilingualism White Paper has a three-fold purpose:

• Synthesizes evidence in the literature as to innovative dynamics of knowledge-sharing and scholarly communication within linguistically diverse scholarly contexts and research networks
• Provides a better understanding of the role of multilingualism within bibliodiversity in scholarly communication, through the lens of publishers and translators/researchers
• Presents the conceptual design of a future OPERAS Translation Platform aiming at supporting translation services at the scholarly communication level (involving publishers, translators, researchers).

OA Business Models White Paper: 

Based on a survey targeting academic book publishers who published books in SSH, this white paper provides insight into how OPERAS can contribute to building sustainable paths of transition towards collaborative models for open access books.  As such, the paper contributes to:

• Providing an in-depth understanding of European monograph publishers’ current business models for open access, their challenges, and their views on how infrastructure for open access monographs could be improved 
• Exploring how the social sciences and humanities (SSH) publishing community applies or could apply collaborative models for open access books, and what issues it encounters when dealing with them 
• Outlining challenges publishers face when engaging with or thinking about engaging in collaborative models for OA books

Early observations from the preliminary analysis of the findings are presented. However, data will be further explored and inform recommendations for OPERAS in the next version of the paper, which is expected towards the end of 2021.

Tools R&D White Paper:

Provides an overview of the existing tools for scholarly publishing, as well as recommendations that will support the building of an open scholarly communication infrastructure. 

• Examines tool types, definitions, and criteria that are able to facilitate their description and selection
• Analyzes tools according to their main publishing functions (such as online and collaborative tools used for authoring, open and commercial tools for peer reviewing, and tools for commenting/annotating) 
• Identifies major trends impacting the future of scholarly communication: preprint servers, artificial intelligence, data papers, and user-centric developments 
• Provides a list of recommendations to address the challenges identified and to provide building blocks for the envisioned open scholarly infrastructure

The Pundit Annotator tool

Pundit Annotator is the perfect tool for work, research and study. It was designed and developed by Net7, which cooperates with OPERAS on various projects.

With Pundit Annotator, one can comment on and highlight selected parts of text, add hyperlinks, hold discussions and suggest modifications. It also broadens one’s everyday reading experience on the web. Pundit Annotator is designed for users who want to exploit the power of web annotation: students, journalists, and users in general.

The tool is free to use and it only requires the user to log in to their account. Web annotations serve to enrich content, enable evaluation and addition of sources, and facilitate and support collaborative research. A great convenience is the possibility to browse comments using the user’s notebook. Once created, user’s annotations remain on the page so that they are visible to them and other people (provided that the comments have been made publicly available).

OPERAS Lab strongly supports Pundit Annotator and recommends its use not only for annotations, but also as a tool for open peer review, as it allows registered users to add their comments to both excerpts and entire white papers. 

The Pundit tool is easy to use. Simply go to the white paper webpage and click on the Pundit logo on the top right corner of the page. Make sure you set your comments to “public” so that other users can see them. You can find a manual on how to use the pundit tool here.

By enabling asynchronous communication and focusing on a limited time-period, we plan to stimulate a genuine conversation around the whitepapers which are designed to improve the papers and may lead to new versions in the future. We explicitly invite you to share your opinions, add relevant information, voice your ideas and pose questions – on the individual Living Book white papers using the Pundit tool.