OPERAS Welcomes Finland

OPERAS is pleased to welcome a new core member: The Federation of Finnish Learned Societies (TSV).

The Federation of Finnish Learned Societies, established in 1899, is a national co-operative body for learned societies in Finland. It contributes to the co-operation between learned societies, supports and develops scholarly communication and publishing, and promotes awareness and usage of research results. It also supports and develops the role of its members in science policy discussion. The Federation maintains the Journal.fi platform, which provides Open Access editing and publishing services for scientific journals, free for the members of the Federation. Journal.fi is designed to meet the needs of authors, readers, publishers and funders in the age of Open Access journals. The service is using the Open Journal Systems 3.2 software.  https://journal.fi/

The Federation also maintains Edition.fi-service for Open Access monographs https://edition.fi/

OPERAS is the European Research Infrastructure for the development of open scholarly communication in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH).

“Through international cooperation, we are able to influence and improve Finnish scholarly activities and showcase Finnish expertise to the rest of the world. Our goal is that the opportunities provided by OPERAS will also benefit Finnish science and research as much as possible. This could be best achieved by inviting OPERAS to join the roadmaps of research in Finland,” says the Executive Director of the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies, Lea Ryynänen-Karjalainen.  

The Federation of Finnish Learned Societies promotes Finnish science through active participation in the field’s international networks. The member societies of the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies will also benefit from the OPERAS membership. In the future, the federation can propose experts to be nominated to the Special Interest Groups – or SIGs – of OPERAS and suggest new themes for these groups. 

OPERAS and TSV have already collaborated especially on the topic of multilingualism for several years. In 2019 OPERAS signed the Helsinki Initiative on Multilingualism to forward multilingualism in scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities. 

The Helsinki Initiative was founded by five signatories: Federation of Finnish Learned Societies (TSV), the Committee for Public Information (TJNK), Finnish Association for Scholarly Publishing, the European Network for Research Evaluation in the Social Sciences and the Humanities (ENRESSH), and the Universities Norway (UHR). They initiated the movement to promote multilingualism in scholarly communication. It aims to reach policy-makers, leaders, universities, research institutions, research funders, libraries, and researchers.

Since then, OPERAS and TSV, especially Janne Polönen cooperated on different activities to support multilingualism in scholarly communication:

• Cooperation for activities of the Multilingualism Special Interest Group
• Collaboration in the Craft-OA project:
  • In CRAFT-OA, TSV is leading Work Package 4 on Journal Software and Platform Improvement supporting Diamond Open Access Journals
• Collaboration in the DIAMAS project:
  • TSV is leading tasks on Multilingualism and gender equity in Work Package 4 and on overviews of national publishing landscapes in Work Package 5  
• Collaboration in the GRASPOS project

“The Federation of Finnish Learned Societies has a long-standing tradition in supporting societies in their endeavour to disseminate knowledge. Today, they are naturally positioned to spearhead the development of Diamond Open Access in Finland, with the journal.fi platform already hosting 140 journals. We appreciate the strong support the Federation brings to the preservation of cultural,  linguistic diversity and multilingualism in scholarly communication. We have been working together for several years on this topic. We are delighted and grateful to the Federation for having accepted our proposition to join OPERAS as a Core member, therefore representing Finland in our Executive Assembly.” Pierre Mounier, OPERAS Coordinator (Community).

As a core member, TSV joins the OPERAS Executive Assembly and coordinates the Finnish community. It is the first member from Finland in OPERAS and as a national node will build a Finnish community. Janne Polönen will be continuing his work for the OPERAS Multilingualism Special Interest Group. 

“It is the responsibility of the Finnish research community to ensure the continued development of scientific terminology and research-based knowledge in our national languages. This requires a healthy infrastructure for publishing journals and books especially in Finnish, a small language of over 5 million speakers. The challenges related to sustainability and open access transition of Finnish publishers are partly specific to the learned societies, who play a major role in Finnish language scholarly publishing. Yet similar challenges are to a very large extent faced by all small-scale non-profit SSH publishers across Europe and beyond. OPERAS provides a perfect network and platform for mutual learning and improvement, not only regarding the conditions of national language publishing but also in the recognition of its value to science and society”. Janne Pölönen, Secretary General for Publication Forum at TSV. 

OPERAS 

OPERAS is the Research Infrastructure supporting open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in the European Research Area. Its mission is to coordinate and federate resources in Europe to efficiently address the scholarly communication needs of European researchers in the field of SSH. OPERAS’ aim is to make Open Science a reality for research in the SSH and achieve a scholarly communication system where knowledge produced in the SSH benefits researchers, academics, students and more generally the whole society across Europe and worldwide, without barriers.

If you want to know more, contact us and find more information on joining OPERAS here: https://operas-eu.org/about/want-to-know-more/want-to-join-operas/

OPERAS Coordinator Community: Pierre Mounier pierre.mounier[at]operas-eu.org