OPERAS Welcomes New Members

APEES, DH+, member of SIB, the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of Zagreb University, and the Centre for Evaluation in Education and Science (CEON/CEES) joined OPERAS. As first members from Switzerland and Serbia, DH+, member of SIB, and CEON/CEES add their expert knowledge and experiences to the OPERAS Research Infrastructure. OPERAS is happy to welcome new members from countries, where OPERAS has not been active before and OPERAS is glad to welcome with APEES a Portuguese member that will help us to enhance our expertise in multilingualism.

OPERAS is also proud to announce that one of our ordinary members, ZRC SAZU, became now part of the Executive Assembly (formerly called core group).

The Portuguese Association of Higher Education Publishers (APEES) is a Portuguese private law association based in Coimbra that brings together 12 Portuguese academic publishers, which is a very significant number considering the reality of the country.

Just as higher education institutions are facing profound changes, academic publishers are also changing significantly, both in organizational terms and in how they concretely operate, in order to meet new types of needs.

APEES is aligned with the national and European efforts to promote open science, which creates new development opportunities for academic publishers, but, at the same time, requires a rationalization of their activities and an intense interinstitutional cooperation, both at national and European levels.

Asked about why they have joined OPERAS and what they hope for the future?

The admission of APEES as a member of OPERAS is part of this cooperation strategy on a European scale aimed at the development of academic publishing in Portugal. The active participation of APEES in the OPERAS consortium aims, in particular, to promote the development and sharing of efficient practices and services in the area of ​​Social Sciences and Humanities by partners, responding to the needs of institutions and authors.

The DH+ group, member of SIB since 2018, fosters the collaboration between Humanities and Bioinformatics researchers around DH research projects, an interdisciplinary work that has started in 2015 at SIB. It fully benefits from the synergy with SIB’s bioinformatics infrastructure and research. It participates to the DH center UNIL-EPFL activities and carries out SNSF projects about ancient manuscripts and Digital Humanities (i.e. HumaReC 2016–2018, and since 2018 MARK16). Involved in the European research it joined the DARIAH H2020 project DESIR (2017–2019) and is now a DARIAH partner in the H2020 project OPERAS-P, inquiring about the new scholarly models of writing and since 2018 a DARIAH cooperating partner.

DH+ participates to the OPERAS Special Interest Group Common Standards, with its  expertise in data management, in partnership with the open public depository Nakala (Huma-Num). It is also involved in the Special Interest Group Tools R&D, with its expertise in multimodal publishing tools with the project eTalks, and is therefore at the forefront of DH research.

The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics is an academic not-for-profit organization whose mission is to lead and coordinate the field of bioinformatics in Switzerland. Its data science experts join forces to advance biological and medical research and enhance health. SIB (i) provides the national and international life science community with a state-of-the-art bioinformatics infrastructure, including services, resources, expertise; and (ii) federates world-class researchers and delivers training in bioinformatics. The institute includes some 80 world-class research and service groups including 800 scientists.

Asked about why they have joined OPERAS and what they hope for the future?

DH+, member of SIB, is joining OPERAS to participate in a lively network of SSH research infrastructures, promoting COAR/SPARC principles, notably open access and interoperability of the data. It is proud to be the first Swiss OPERAS member, at a time where digitized Humanities projects are spreading in this country.

For more information visit: https://digitalhumanitiesplus.sib.swiss/

In Croatia OPERAS already has partnerships with the University of Zadar and members of the University of Zagreb, including besides the University Computing Centre (SRCE) now the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (FHSS) as well. FHSS is the largest higher education and research institution in the country in the field of humanities and social sciences, as well as a significant cultural institution that has an important impact on Croatian culture and society. It performs research activities and offers more than 100 university programs (BA, MA and PhD) in a wide array of humanities disciplines, such as history, archaeology, philosophy, ethnology, anthropology, history of art, linguistics, phonetics, languages and literature studies; as well as in the Social Sciences, such as psychology, sociology, information and communication sciences and pedagogy. There is a strong focus on international cooperation and the FHSS currently serves as the national representative for research infrastructures CESSDA, CLARIN and ESS. With its active publishing program, it is dedicated to openness: all 10 journals are available in Hrčak – central portal of Croatian scientific journals; while books are available in FF Open Press, Faculty’s own publishing platform developed with PKP-OMP. Moreover, FHSS also contributes to the steering and development of Croatian open repositories infrastructure DABAR – Digital Academic Archives and Repositories.

For more information visit:  https://ffzg.unizg.hr/international 

With the Centre for Evaluation in Education and Science (CEON/CEES) OPERAS adds another important member and its first partner from Serbia. CEON/CEES is an independent non-governmental, non-for-profit organization, that specializes in building digital infrastructures for Open Access journal publishing and evaluation, with special focus on metadata quality, implementation of PIDs, open citations, integrity of editorial policies, legitimacy of citations, and interoperability. It has also developed a complex journal evaluation framework relying on sound and sustainable journal quality and impact indicators.

CEON/CEES’s flagship product is the Serbian Citation Index – SCIndeks, a hybrid platform integrating an online publishing framework, a full-text OA database, and the national citation index. With 219 journals, SCIndeks is the largest Open Access publishing platform in Serbia. Articles in Social Sciences and Humanities account for about 50% of its full-text current content.

For more information visit: https://www.ceon.rs

Asked about why they have joined OPERAS and what they hope for the future?

The OPERAS network and CEON/CEES share many interests and focuses, such as the striving to develop sustainable non-APC Open Access publishing platforms, interoperability on multiple levels, fostering multilingualism, developing sustainable metrics and promoting high publishing standards. By joining the OPERAS network, CEON/CEES expects to improve the discoverability of local journals in SSH, to take part in the development of common publishing standards, and share with an international community the innovative practices and workflows developed in the local context.

CEON/CEES participates in the Special Interest Group Common Standards and will also contribute to the Special Interest Group Tools R&D and the Special Interest Group Best Practices.

The Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU) is now our newest member in the Executive Assembly. ZRC SAZU consists of 18 research units or institutes throughout Slovenia with almost 300 researchers conducting basic research across a range of fields, including natural, earth, and spatial sciences, and the social sciences and humanities. The two biggest institutes are the institute for geography and the institute for Slovenian language. The expertise of the latter is, for instance, directly applied in lexicography and the creation of Slovenian monolingual dictionaries. As a constituent part of ZRC SAZU, the Založba ZRC/ZRC Publishing House publishes more than 50 book series and fourteen journals. Most of them are available in an open access format. 

For more information visit: https://www.zrc-sazu.si/en/node

Join OPERAS

Want to become part of the OPERAS Research Infrastructure as well? OPERAS membership is open to any organisation in Europe and worldwide, which adopts OPERAS’ principles (containing the OPERAS definitions of open science, open access and the FAIR principles), abides by its rules of participation and contributes to its actions. As a member you can take part in the development and formation of the OPERAS services and decision processes, while being offered coordination, a network and support regarding to all open scholarly communication issues for social sciences and humanities. 

There are different kinds of memberships possible, such as Observer, Associate member, Ordinary member, Core member and Supporting member. 

For more information: http://operas-eu.org/want-to-join-operas