OPEN ACCESS IN THE EUROPEAN AREA THROUGH SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION

Their core work

OPERAS is a European research infrastructure that builds and operates services for open scholarly communication, with a specific focus on the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). Their core work involves developing federated platforms that make SSH research outputs discoverable, accessible, and multilingual across the European Research Area. Recognized as an ESFRI landmark, they serve as the connective tissue between SSH research communities and the broader European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), ensuring that humanities and social science research meets FAIR data standards and open access requirements. In practice, this means running aggregation and discovery services, supporting open access publishing workflows, and coordinating across national research infrastructures to build a coherent, inclusive open science environment for SSH disciplines.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

Both H2020 projects started in 2019, so there is no multi-year arc to trace — the keyword split reflects two parallel workstreams rather than a genuine chronological shift. That said, SSHOC's keywords (open science, FAIR data, ESFRI, research infrastructures) point to foundational infrastructure and policy positioning, while TRIPLE's keywords (discovery platform, multilingualism, SSS resources) point to concrete service delivery and end-user tooling. The implied direction is from building the open science framework toward deploying specific discovery and access services that researchers can actually use. If this trajectory continues beyond H2020, OPERAS is likely deepening its focus on multilingual, user-facing infrastructure rather than staying purely at the policy or coordination level.

OPERAS is moving from broad EOSC framework participation toward specialized, operational services for multilingual SSH discovery — making them increasingly relevant for any consortium that needs domain-specific open access infrastructure for humanities and social sciences.

How they like to work

OPERAS participates exclusively as a partner rather than leading projects, reflecting the nature of a specialized infrastructure node that contributes a defined service rather than driving a research agenda. Notably, with just two projects they engaged 64 unique partners across 20 countries — a footprint typical of large ESFRI cluster projects where OPERAS serves as one of many national or thematic nodes. This suggests they are a well-networked, trusted contributor within the European open science ecosystem, and that partnering with them brings access to a broad SSH infrastructure community.

Despite only two H2020 projects, OPERAS has engaged 64 unique consortium partners across 20 countries — a reflection of the large, multi-institutional consortia typical of ESFRI-level infrastructure projects. Their network is pan-European with no visible geographic concentration, consistent with their mandate to serve the entire European Research Area.

What sets them apart

OPERAS occupies a rare niche: they are one of the only organizations in Europe with an explicit mandate for open scholarly communication infrastructure specifically in the Social Sciences and Humanities — a domain routinely underserved by infrastructure initiatives dominated by STEM. Their ESFRI landmark status gives them institutional credibility that few SSH-focused organizations can match, and their dual participation in both SSHOC and TRIPLE means they were active across the two largest H2020 investments in SSH open science simultaneously. For a consortium needing an SSH open access or EOSC compliance partner, OPERAS brings domain authority, a broad network, and recognized infrastructure rather than a research team that happens to know the field.

Highlights from their portfolio

• SSHOC
  A flagship ESFRI cluster project building the Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud — one of the most significant SSH infrastructure investments in H2020, situating OPERAS at the center of European open science for humanities.
• TRIPLE
  Directly funded (EUR 114,000) to build a multilingual discovery platform for SSH resources, a technically distinctive challenge that goes beyond standard open access work and reflects OPERAS's operational service role.