We are excited and proud to announce the launch of the OPERAS Crowdfunding Initiative – a special Christmas surprise for the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) community!

The OPERAS Channel on the wemakeit platform

To promote the use of crowdfunding in its community, the OPERAS Research Infrastructure is launching a dedicated channel on the crowdfunding platform wemakeit.com: the OPERAS Channel. 

We invite researchers from all Social Sciences and Humanities disciplines to run their crowdfunding campaign with the OPERAS channel, get tips from the wemakeit experts to boost their campaign and benefit from the support of the OPERAS community.

Whether you are an early career researcher in a university or other research institution, an independent researcher, or an established scholar looking to start a new line of research, the wemakeit platform is for you. No matter if you need funds to publish critical editions, to organise scientific exhibitions, to launch surveys and studies with local or global impact, the OPERAS channel is the way to go!

The first researchers that will launch their project campaign in early 2022 will, as a bonus, receive extra support by an external communication agency, funded by the French Ministry for Education, Research and Innovation!

You can find the conditions for participation and more information in the FAQ on the OPERAS channel web page. If you have further questions, please send us an email at operas@wemakeit.com.

Introduction workshop on 13 January

Are you curious about what crowdfunding can do for you and for the Social Sciences and Humanities? Just one hint: it is not just about money. 

If you consider starting a project campaign with us, but do not know where to start, we offer a 1-hour introduction workshop on Thursday, 13 January 2022 at 17:00 CET.

The science crowdfunding experts from wemakeit will provide you with tips and tools to understand what crowdfunding is, how it can be applied to science, and how to launch your own campaign on the OPERAS channel of wemakeit to collect financial support from the crowd, but also communicate your research in the most exciting format. The presentation will be followed by 30 minutes of Q&A – we want to make sure you have all the information you need to get started with your project.

Register here for free:

You will be sent a Zoom-Link a few days prior to the event.

Why a collaboration of OPERAS and wemakeit?

OPERAS is the Research Infrastructure supporting open scholarly communication in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) in the European Research Area. The aim of OPERAS 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.

OPERAS is creating a portfolio of different scholarly communication services at European level, addressing the specific needs of the research community. One of these services is the discovery platform GoTriple, developed by us, the TRIPLE project (2019–2023). It is through the TRIPLE project that OPERAS and wemakeit collaborate.

In addition to its core discovery function, the GoTriple platform integrates a range of other innovative services and tools, including a crowdfunding platform. Both platforms, GoTriple and the OPERAS channel from wemakeit, are interconnected to provide an ideal environment for SSH researchers and their projects.

wemakeit was founded in Switzerland in 2012 and is now one of the largest crowdfunding platforms in Europe, with a total of over 66 million Euro of backings, more than 5,500 successful projects and almost 500,000 community members.

wemakeit collaborates with a range of different partners, among them media partners, foundations, organisations and companies. OPERAS is one of them, and the OPERAS channel is one of currently 13 active channels and initiatives of wemakeit that back and support projects.

Are you in?

Excited to crowdfund your research project and be supported by the OPERAS community? We can’t wait to learn more about your project idea!

All necessary information and the conditions of participation are available here: https://wemakeit.com/pages/operas. You can also contact us by email at operas@wemakeit.com.

You can find general information on starting a project on the wemakeit platform here: https://wemakeit.com/pages/start-a-project and guidelines here: https://wemakeit.com/pages/guidelines.

Further resources on crowdfunding (i.e. links to articles, papers, presentations) are here: https://project.gotriple.eu/crowdfunding-resources.

We would like to remember the first TRIPLE International Conference and look back the many contributions from speakers, panelists and moderators and the lively discussions with the audience. Read the full report here:

What role do the social sciences and humanities (SSH) play in the discussion about open research in Europe? Which considerations do we take into account when choosing business models for open science projects? Can a hackathon help answer SSH-specific questions (such as the challenges in creating a multilingual vocabulary for a discovery service)? Does crowdfunding work in SSH projects? How does the GoTriple discovery platform fit into the ecosystem of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC)?

These are just some of the questions addressed during the 1st TRIPLE International Conference “Empowering Discovery in Open Social Sciences and Humanities” hosted online by the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL PAN) on 22–24 November 2021. The event also provided a unique opportunity to launch the beta version of the GoTriple platform and to discuss its functionalities with the SSH community.

We thank over 140 participants – researchers, university and library staff, publishers, science journalists, SMEs, public authorities and policy makers – for joining us! Throughout the conference, the TRIPLE Twitter account was on fire: Tweets reached an audience of over 10,000 people! It shows that the TRIPLE project addresses some hot topics within the social sciences and humanities.

The conference was opened by an introduction to the goals and vision of the OPERAS Research Infrastructure. Maciej Maryl and Marta Błaszczyńska (IBL PAN/OPERAS-PL, Poland) and Larissa Saar and Pattrick Piel (Max Weber Stiftung/OPERAS-GER, Germany) then presented the newly launched national nodes. The national initiatives will share information about recent developments in the OPERAS Research Infrastructure with local stakeholders and SSH communities. 

One of the key topics of Sabina Leonelli’s (University of Exeter) keynote speech were ethical issues surrounding open research data. Although she started off from the COVID pandemic and the implications for sharing large medical datasets containing vulnerable data, her major concerns are also valid for SSH research: Is it ethical to collect data from vulnerable populations and communities and use them for the benefit of other, mostly privileged societies? How to create and implement a global standard for collecting, storing and sharing highly relevant data so that they can be reused by researchers from many different disciplinary backgrounds and research organisations? How to convince SSH communities to participate in a global network of researchers sharing their datasets in accordance with the FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship?

The next session, moderated by Emilie Blotière (Huma-Num, France), was devoted to the GoTriple platform, developed by the TRIPLE project. In short demos, TRIPLE partners showcased basic functionalities, such as browsing and filtering the multilingual dataset of resources ingested from major European aggregators. 

In the first Session of the next day of the conference, participants learned about the GoTriple hackathon, which had taken place on 8–10 and 15–16 November. The aim of this virtual event had been to assess and improve coverage of the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) in the GoTriple vocabulary by using existing subject headings systems that are already in use for the organisation of publications in social sciences and humanities (SSH) disciplines. Participants were software programmers and researchers with a dedicated interest in vocabularies, programming librarians, non-IT specialists and professionals managing repositories.

The organisers of the hackathon, Iraklis Katsaloulis (EKT, Greece) and Cezary Rosiński (IBL PAN, Poland), together with some of the hackathon participants from the Greek, Polish and Portuguese-German teams, presented the results of the event. They also addressed the main challenges of the hackathon format in the SSH community.

In Session 2 of Day 2, conference participants were given the opportunity to discuss crowdfunding in research contexts. Alizé Averasano from the Swiss crowdfunding platform wemakeit gave some food for thought when sharing examples of crowdfunding in science. Mariannig Le Bechec (Univ. Lyon 1, France) and Luigi di Pace (Univ. Milano-Biccoca, Italy) presented success stories and challenges of crowdfunding teams working for universities. The audience also learned about crowdfunding in science from the European Commission’s perspective, thanks to the contribution by Michael Arentoft (EC’s Open Science Unit, Belgium).

The participants’ discussion brought up a number of questions, such as: How can SSH research be made more “sexy”’ for a broader audience, or: Is it really necessary to make it more “sexy” in order to receive crowdfunding? – “No,” was Alizé Averasano’s answer, “the key to success is communication about your project”. Other questions were: How can we touch people’s emotions with often non-emotional research topics? What are the ways to learn new communication strategies for crowdfunding? The discussion was moderated by Stefano da Paoli and Paula Forbes from Abertay University (UK).

Day 3 of the TRIPLE International Conference offered two panel sessions. The first one, titled “Business & Open Science – Contrast or Complement?”, was moderated by Gert Breitfuss and Leonie Disch from Know-Center. The panelists presented and discussed different types of business models that work best for Open Science projects, with a focus on sustainability. Gert Breitfuss first presented the work around developing a business model for the GoTriple platform, which included an analysis of 26 existing platforms and services and their business models.

Next, Niels Stern talked about OAPEN, a foundation that operates the OAPEN Library and and the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), two platforms that provide open access to scholarly publications. Another platform, CORE, and the service’s sustainability paths, was presented by founder and Head Petr Knoth.

Vanessa Proudman, Director of SPARC Europe and representative of The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS), raised questions on ethical considerations regarding which aspects of a project could be offered as a paid service, and which user groups could be charged. For instance, CORE differentiates between those who plan to monetise data acquired from the CORE services and institutions or researchers who use data for non-commercial purposes. All panelists concluded that no matter what, long-term funding is critical to sustain the service after the conclusion of a project. 

Final recommendations from the panel for projects developing services were:

• Put the user in the centre – bring the community on board during the process of building the service and put an emphasis on usability
• Raise awareness, ask about the needs of the community to ensure their engagement and support after the project is finished
• Use success stories from users to showcase the benefits of the service
• Listen to the community, but also trust your own expertise, vision and determination while developing the service
• Be a visionary and think ahead but be realistic on what you can develop and deliver
• Think about, right from the start of a project, which aspects could be monetised and who would need to pay for these services and data
• Decide on the governance and type of organisation behind a service or platform

The last session was titled “GoTriple in the EOSC Ecosystem” and was moderated by Francesca di Donato from CNR. Panelists were Daan Broeder (CLARIN/SSHOC), Elena Giglia (OPERAS), Laure Barbot (DARIAH/SSHOC), Carsten Thiel (CESSDA) and Klaas Wierenga (GÉANT and EOSC Future).

The moderator posed several questions that the panelist then answered one by one, after shortly presenting their organisations’ relationship with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). One focus of the ensuing discussions were the existing and potential future connections between their infrastructures and services (e.g. the SSH Open Marketplace developed by the SSHOC project) and the GoTriple platform, and what is needed to intensify collaborative efforts towards a shared goal, i.e. to strengthen the SSH component in the EOSC.

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Go to the event web page to find the complete programme and list of speakers, panelists and moderators.

Slides and recordings of the event will soon be available on Zenodo (OPERAS Community) and the TRIPLE YouTube channel.

The 3-day conference was the first international event of this kind in the TRIPLE project. The 2nd TRIPLE International Conference conference will be held in early 2023. Stay tuned!

Who is behind the TRIPLE project? What is their role in the project, what is their background, and how did they get in touch with the Open Science movement? Get to know the TRIPLE project team and read the latest episode of our new series on the OPERAS blog. This time we feature Gert Breitfuss from Know-Center:

https://operas.hypotheses.org/5056

The TRIPLE project has launched the first of several training resources on the DARIAH-Campus platform.  The training resource, entitled ‘The Open Access Publishing Platform ORE (Open Research Europe)‘, provides technical details on how ORE works and the benefits it has for researchers in the Social Sciences and Humanities. The training, which was part of the TRIPLE Open Science Training Series, was jointly led by Emma Lazzeri, Open Science researcher at GARR and ISTI-CNR, and Ilaria Fava, Project Officer in the field of Open Science at the Goettingen State University Library (UGOE), in April 2021.

The collection of resources that TRIPLE will contribute to DARIAH-Campus over the coming months will provide training on EOSC activities and related issues.  As both DARIAH and TRIPLE are committed to ensuring best practice in Open Science, this collection of resources will form an important contribution to ongoing skills development among researchers in the Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities.

More resources from TRIPLE will be added over the next few months, but you can view the first of these here now: 

https://campus.dariah.eu/id/bCwy-3HWGaC4DXiocdUhY

To find more resources on Open Science and many other topics within Digital Humanities, you can browse the collections on DARIAH-Campus here: https://campus.dariah.eu.

(image credits: Vicky Garnett)

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A version of this post was first published by DARIAH-EU on 16 November 2021: link.

Are you interested in helping with the initial testing of the Beta version of the GoTriple platform?  We currently offer different ways to do just that!

The TRIPLE project has partnered with another European H2020 project called ReachOut to recruit early testers.

ReachOut, the beta-testing campaign platform for research projects, is able to offer a 30 Euro reward for up to 24 participants for the testing of the Beta version of GoTriple via their website.  Participants will be entered into a draw if more than this number fully complete the test. Testing will take less than an hour with a short questionnaire to complete at the end to tell us what you think of the platform so far and what should be improved.  To start the testing, please use this link: https://www.reachout-project.eu/view/Main/#TRIPLE_anc.

The Beta version of GoTriple is an initial release of some of the planned features of GoTriple. More features of GoTriple are still to come, such as the user profiles and relevant discovery dashboards. So stay in touch to find out more on https://project.gotriple.eu/ . We will likely run another testing session before Christmas, as soon as additional features are released.  

We are also looking for some participants for the qualitative testing phase and for the definition of the governance of GoTriple. For any questions about the ReachOut testing campaign or to participate in the qualitative research, please get in touch with p.forbes@abertay.ac.uk or s.depaoli@abertay.ac.uk and subscribe to the TRIPLE Community Mailing List.

Another, very simple way to give feedback on GoTriple is to click on the “bug button” on the platform website and complete a short form:

Get involved and give us your opinion on how we can make GoTriple better!!

The TRIPLE project proudly launches the
Beta Release of the GoTriple platform,
available for exploration at gotriple.eu.

Download this press release text as a PDF

What is GoTriple?

GoTriple is an innovative multilingual discovery platform for the social sciences and humanities (SSH). It provides one of the central access points for discovering and reusing research artefacts that are relevant to the wide variety of disciplines under the umbrella domain of SSH: Publications and research data, project descriptions and researcher profiles are automatically imported from aggregators and source providers, semantically enriched and linked in GoTriple.

The platform enables users to:

• discover and reuse open scholarly SSH resources in nine European languages (Croatian, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish), which are currently scattered across local and discipline-specific repositories;
• find and connect with other researchers and projects across disciplinary, cultural and language boundaries;
• make use of innovative tools and services to support research, visualisation of search results, web annotation, personalised recommendations and social networking;
• explore new ways of funding research such as crowdfunding.

Watch this short video that showcases the GoTriple platform:

GoTriple is developed as part of TRIPLE, a project financed under the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme with approx. 5.6 million Euros for a duration of 42 months (2019–2023). It will be the Discovery Service of OPERAS, the Research Infrastructure supporting open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities in the European Research Area, and it is designed to be integrated into and thus to enrich the services of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) for the SSH communities.

What to expect in this Beta Release?

With already more than 6 million items ingested (currently publications), the first prototype of the GoTriple platform is now ready for exploration!

GoTriple currently allows multilingual searches, which means that you can find publications in a specific language by using keywords in one of the nine languages supported by the platform.

Other available features in the Beta Release are: searching for publications and authors, filtering the results by type of publication author, year and discipline, as well as accessing the original page of the document to download available items.

You can also get an early glimpse of some of the innovative services of the platform, namely:

• the Visual Discovery System, which enables you to get an instant overview of your search results and to analyse research trends,
• a first version of the Recommender System, which currently provides users with personalised recommendations on publications related to their search queries.

How can I get involved?

GoTriple will be open for usability testing before the end of the year, and all members of the SSH community will then be warmly invited to review the platform and provide feedback.

If you would like to be informed about opportunities to become a GoTriple tester, join the TRIPLE User Community and subscribe to the TRIPLE Community Mailing List.

What are the next steps?

The Beta+ Release, expected to be launched in March 2022, will have a more stable front and back end, allowing searches for datasets, research projects and researcher profiles on top of publications. GoTriple will also offer more features related to the innovative services of the platform, such as the Annotation System, the Trust Building System and the Crowdfunding Platform.

In the coming months, we will be publishing further updates on the platform specification, the plans for content ingestion and the innovative services. Stay tuned!

For more detailed information visit the TRIPLE project website at project.gotriple.eu.

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Contacts: 

Suzanne Dumouchel (Huma-Num), TRIPLE Project Coordinator, suzanne.dumouchel@huma-num.fr

Stefanie Pohle (Max Weber Stiftung), TRIPLE Communication Officer, pohle@maxweberstiftung.de

We invite programmers, librarians and researchers with programming skills, repository managers and non-IT specialists who work with managing vocabularies to the first GoTriple Hackathon to improve the coverage of the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) in the vocabulary of the discovery platform GoTriple. Participants will collaboratively work on finding solutions to the problem of mapping between vocabularies in the nine European languages that are represented in the TRIPLE Project (Croatian, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish) and the LCSH.

The virtual event, which is organised by TRIPLE partner EKT, takes place on 8–10 and 15–16 November 2021, and there is a preparatory meeting on 3 November (1pm to 3pm CET).

Download the Open Call here:

For more information about the Hackathon, go to the event web page: https://project.gotriple.eu/gotriple-hackathon-2021/ – register today and join a #GoTripleHackathon team!

Who is behind the TRIPLE project? What is their role in the project, what is their background, and how did they get in touch with the Open Science movement? Get to know the TRIPLE project team and read the latest episode of our new series on the OPERAS blog. This time we feature Marina Angelaki from EKT:

https://operas.hypotheses.org/5007

Who is behind the TRIPLE project? What is their role in the project, what is their background, and how did they get in touch with the Open Science movement? Get to know the TRIPLE project team and read the latest episode of our new series on the OPERAS blog. This time we feature Luca de Santis:

operas-eu.org/4949

The first TRIPLE International Conference takes place as a virtual event from 22 to 24 November 2021.

We would like to bring together members from the Open Science and social sciences and humanities (SSH) communities (researchers, university and library staff) as well as other TRIPLE stakeholders such as publishers, science journalists, SMEs, public authorities and policy makers. We aim to create a productive space for discussing the impact, benefits and challenges of discovery services for the social sciences and humanities in the European research ecosystem.

Topics include…

• the TRIPLE project within OPERAS, the European Research Infrastructure for the development of open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities
• the concept of “openness” in the social sciences and humanities (SSH)
• the nascent GoTriple platform, the innovative multilingual and multicultural discovery solution for the SSH
• creating an SSH vocabulary
• crowdfunding in science
• business models for Open Science
• the role of SSH in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC)

Check out the programme on the TRIPLE Conference page. The three-day discussions will take place in two time slots in the afternoons. All session times are Central European Time (CET). Registration opens within the next few weeks.