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.

---

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!

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!!

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!

Your opinion is needed! Which tools would you like to have available on the GOTRIPLE platform?

We would like to hear opinions from reserachers in the social sciences and humanities fields (future GOTRIPLE users) about what kind of services we could integrate in the platform. This will help us plan for the future and make sure that the users will find the services that they need the most in GOTRIPLE.

TRIPLE is a European H2020 project that launched on 7 October 2019. At the heart of the project is the development of the GOTRIPLE platform, an innovative multilingual and multicultural discovery solution for social sciences and humanities. GOTRIPLE will provide a single access point that allows researchers in social sciences and humanities to explore, find, access and reuse materials such as literature, data, projects and researcher profiles at the European scale. Also GOTRIPLE will be integrated with specific “innovative services”, namely a Recommender System, the Trust Building System for selected users interactions, an interactive Visualisation search interface, a web Annotation Tool and a Crowdfunding platform.

Please let us know what you think by using this anonymous feedback questionnaire:

https://forms.gle/rUUkvuUGptjZcxzs9

It will just take 2 minutes of your time and it is your opportunity to help shape GOTRIPLE. The survey will remain open for 3 weeks.

Thank you for taking part!

For specific questions regarding the methodology of the survey, please contact Dr. Stefano De Paoli, Abertay University (s.depaoli[at]abertay.ac.uk).

TRIPLE’s first virtual ThatCamp, “Discovering Discovery: Envision your ideal research ecosystem for exploring research resources” on 11 May 2021 drew in over 50 participants from 15 different European countries (see the map below). Affiliated with libraries, universities, research institutions, government agencies, publishing companies, and private firms across Europe, the participants engaged in the typical peer-to-peer session format of ThatCamps to jointly “create, build, write, hack, and solve problems” (https://thatcamp.org/about/index.html).

ThatCamp stands for “The Humanities And Technology Camp”. It is a so-called unconference: an open, agile and spontaneous meeting where participants learn and work together by engaging in group discussions, co-working sessions or other forms of collaborative work.

Suzanne Dumouchel (Huma-Num), the TRIPLE project and scientific coordinator, opened up the event introducing the TRIPLE project and encouraging participants to share their knowledge openly. Next, Stefanie Pohle (Max Weber Stiftung), the TRIPLE project communication officer, briefed the group on the basics of a ThatCamp format and the goals of the event: to promote interdisciplinary discussion, to uncover “discovery” needs and challenges faced by researchers and other stakeholder groups, and: to have fun at this collaborative event.

After a short warm-up that doubled as an introduction to each other and to the ThatCamp’s Miro board (an online “whiteboard” used to collect ideas, jot down notes, and share session takeaways), participants collaboratively planned the programme, pitching their ideas for the sessions and casting their votes for the most engaging topics. Even in the weeks before the event, they had brainstormed on topics important to them and had posted them on the virtual whiteboard.

The day of the ThatCamp was divided into two main session time slots, with four sessions held simultaneously in both the late morning and the afternoon. 11 participants pitched a session topic and the following eight were voted into the schedule:

In the last hour of the event, Irena Vipavc Brvar (CESSDA/UL-ADP) guided the session leaders to present their results to the entire group. With a dedicated five minutes per presentation, each presenter was only able to scratch the surface of what they covered in their hour and half long discussion. Below you can find some bullet points from each group that we captured during the event. The Miro whiteboards from each session have been preserved and published in an Open Access format on Zenodo (http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4769438 ). 

Morning session with 4 topics

Group 1. How to disseminate and make Digital Scholarship discoverable: Experiences, ideas and proposals in order to have new forms of scholarship, based on electronic publishing, more discoverable in the infosphere

Session leader: Federico Meschini, Research Fellow in Digital Humanities at Tuscia University, Italy

✓  Scholars are engaged in creating new forms of digital scholarship but guidance is needed to lead them to good results
✓ Many perspectives and resources 
✓  Researchers are still attached to the pdf, often also because they are requested to do so
✓  The need of technical guidance in terms of standards/interoperability 
✓  Evaluation systems acts as a limitation to innovation and cultural change among researchers  

Group 2. Difficulties in discovery: What are your annoyances? Vent them here

Session leader: Paula Forbes, Researcher at Abertay University, Scotland

Several questions with possible solutions were given:
✓  How do we use the results of the search? History/ Outputs
✓  How do we manage the conflict between focussed search and serendipitous discovery? Recommender systems 
✓ How can we overcome the use of so many different terms? Multidisciplinarity / languages
✓ How to find tools that enable the analysis of our discoveries? Marketplace of free tools
✓ Especially difficult is when there is the lack of Open Access (or no labelling that it’s not OA) and when users don’t have control

Group 3. What are the obstacles and challenges in offering a discovery service for a library and do they apply to a (hypothetical) Open Access discovery service?

Session leader: Julika Mimkes, Subject specialist for chemistry and physics at State and university library (SUB) Göttingen, Germany

✓  Discovery system as a part of a library service used for discoverability of open access resources has many challenges: organizational, resources, technology and user interaction
✓  Important to think about users and resources such as preprints and how to handle them within the collection

Group 4. Overcoming the discoverability crisis

Session leaders: Peter Kraker, Chairman of Open Knowledge Maps, and Michela Vignoli, Community Manager of Open Knowledge Maps, Austria

✓  Think of sustainability of Open Infras: funding and what could be done to support the funding more, and explain clearly the benefits/advantages for institutions 
✓  New solution ideas: suggestion to enable searching multiformat contents (not only pdfs!), advanced analysis/knowledge extraction tools (combination with Artificial Intelligence AI)
✓  Important to socialize the systems: notification through social media/networks; collaborative ways to edit results

Afternoon session with 4 topics

Group 1. Ideas to improve peer reviews in scientific documents

Session leader: Soumya Sarkar, Postdoctoral Researcher in Natural Language Processing at TU Darmstadt, Germany

✓  Main issues: lack of resources; blind review is not so effective, lack of communication between reviewers; open review is not effective, sometimes biases affect quality review process 
✓  Quality of reviewers and reviews tend to be affected by motivation
✓  Great demand for fast publishing; hyperproduction of papers, not much time for quality reviews
✓  Possible solution is a focus group of researchers and reviewers to discuss problems with the review process in general and TRIPLE is seen as a perfect mediator of that

Group 2. What is the meaning of “discovery” in the different languages?

Session leader: Francesca Di Donato, Open Science researcher at ILC-CNR, Italy

✓  Different languages have the same problem – there is no appropriate translation which covers the complexity of the meaning of the term ‘discovery’
✓  Many languages cannot translate the term literally, but offer and explanation and describe it in order not to diminish the meaning of the word “discovery”
✓  Main difference between discovery platform (curated contents coming from trusted sources) and search/browsing platforms
✓  The concept of discovery platform is linked to recommendation systems + concept of finding something new related to discovery
✓  The concept of ‘discovery’ implies the concept of innovation

Group 3. If you had a complete discovery portal for SSH research outcomes, how would you like to use it? What functionality would you like to find?

Session leader: Alessia Bardi, OpenAIRE and Researcher at the Institute of Information Science and technologies at the Italian National Research Council

✓  Although most of the people start their search from Google, Google is just an entry point, and once you enter the source if you find relevant functionalities you stay in the repository 
✓  The importance of the links between different types of research products. Wanted functionalities: ORCID, DOI, open access status, access rights attached to a specific resource
✓  Usefulness of searching for research outcomes based on the funding projects/project initiatives after the project is finished
✓  Researchers in SSH are not only interested in one scientific product, but trends and solutions adopted by other domains might be reused as well (this will save money and other resources)

Group 4. What do I have to keep in mind as a researcher when it comes to thinking of discovery systems? Optimising keywords, just this? https://dkblog.hypotheses.org/

Session leader: Michael Kaiser, Department Head perspectivia.net, Libraries, IT, Max Weber Stiftung, Germany

✓ Organizational and cultural aspects. Scholarly blogs can help because scholars are in charge
✓ Importance of having liaison person between libraries, scholars (close contact + exchange needs) and research software developers
✓ Organization of joined workshops for different groups
✓ Blogging scholars are aware of metadata and their meaning but may not be aware of standards, i. e. keywords that use standard categories  
✓ Scholars in general should learn skills in digital literacy

Most session leaders conveyed a similar conclusion that the TRIPLE project can act as a platform for exchanging ideas. They suggested more events like the TRIPLE ThatCamp to further develop ideas from the group discussions. 

Stefanie Pohle wrapped up the event with a huge thank you to all participants and the whole ThatCamp team and invited everyone to join the next TRIPLE ThatCamp that is planned for early 2022. 

Stay updated on TRIPLE events on our events page and by signing up for the OPERAS Newsletter!

At the end of October, we had issued a call for European experts from the social sciences and humanities (SSH) who would like to join the newly established TRIPLE Advisory Board (TAB). Many thanks to the twelve scholars who have volunteered to become part of the TRIPLE project and help us reach our objective to develop the innovative multilingual and multicultural discovery service GOTRIPLE.

Role of the Advisory Board

In accordance with our project philosophy to directly and actively involve the future user community in the development and design process, the TRIPLE Advisory Board (TAB) will provide strategic direction and support. The focus of our work with the TAB will be on specific technical issues such as the use of the MORESS categories to classify SSH disciplines, the TRIPLE data model and the thesaurus.

The TAB is meant to be a flexible, dynamic and rather informal group of experts that is going to work in an open, agile format. The contributions will be upon request from the TRIPLE Work Package Leaders Team and depend on the members’ availability and specific expertise with regard to their discipline and/or language(s). In this regard, the role of the TAB will be a bit different from traditional advisory or scientific committees.

The TAB members will also use opportunities to spread the word about TRIPLE within their own scientific and/or regional community in order to find potential beta testers of the future platform GOTRIPLE to gather their feedback on the design, the functionalities, usability aspects and their overall user experience. Upon completion of the project, the TAB member may also act as mentors for other users. 

Members

The TRIPLE Advisory Board (TAB) is currently comprised of twelve members working in seven different European countries (Spain, Italy, France, Portugal, Netherlands, Cyprus, Austria). Their disciplinary backgrounds include philosophy, history and art history, information science, archaeology, philology, linguistics, sociology, digital humanities.

List of members in alphabetical order:

• Amelia Sanz, Complutense  University of Madrid
• Angelo Mario Del Grosso, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “A. Zampolli” (ILC-CNR)
• Anne Klammt, Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte Paris
• Cristina Freitas, University of Coimbra
• Elea Gimenez, Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales
• Enrico Pasini, Istituto per il Lessico Intellettuale Europeo e Storia delle Idee (ILIESI-CNR) and University of Turin
• Francesca Frontini, Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale “A. Zampolli” (ILC-CNR) and from 2021 part of CLARIN Board of Directors
• Francesca Morselli, DARIAH-EU/DANS
• Georgios Artopoulos, The Cyprus Institute
• Markus Hadler, Graz University
• Maria Manuel Borges, University of Coimbra
• Riccardo Pozzo, University of Rome Tor Vergata

Although the inaugural meeting of the TAB members with the TRIPLE team will not take place until January 2021, some members have offered to start working on specific tasks immediately. Great to have such a dynamic and pro-active pool of experts! We’re very much looking forward to collaborating with them.

We’re looking for you!

• Are you a researcher (PhD level or higher) in one of the social sciences and humanities (SSH) disciplines?
• Would you like to contribute to the development of a highly innovative discovery solution at European level?
• Are you somewhat familiar with data harvesting processes?
• Are you keen to share your expertise in an interdisciplinary and multicultural environment?
• Are you interested in expanding your scientific network in the area of Open Science?

Then consider becoming a member of the TRIPLE Advisory Board! The TRIPLE consortium is currently looking for European SSH experts who would like to join this newly established body.

TRIPLE project

The TRIPLE project was launched on 7 October 2019 and is funded under the European Commission program INFRAEOSC-02-2019 “Prototyping new innovative services” until 2023. 

The consortium consists of 19 partners from 13 European countries; the TRIPLE team comprises about 90 members of staff who work in one or more of the eight work packages.

GOTRIPLE platform

At the heart of the project is the development of the GOTRIPLE platform, an innovative multilingual and multicultural discovery solution for the social sciences and humanities. It will be one of the dedicated services of OPERAS, the Research Infrastructure supporting open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in the European Research Area.

A first prototype of GOTRIPLE is planned to be released in autumn 2021. 

Based on the Isidore search engine developed by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), the GOTRIPLE will provide a single access point for users (researchers, institutions such as universities and libraries, but also enterprises and the media)

• to discover and reuse open scholarly SSH resources in nine European languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Croatian, Polish, Italian), i.e. research data and publications, which are currently scattered across local repositories;
• to find and connect with other researchers and projects across disciplinary and language boundaries;
• to make use of innovative tools to support research (e.g. visualisation, annotation, trust building and recommender system);
• to discover new ways of funding research (e.g. crowdfunding).

The core of the GOTRIPLE platform will be mainly a “pipeline” where data are ingested, classified, enriched and categorised so they can be easily found and retrieved by the users. 

After a year of preparatory work, we are now starting the actual development of the platform, but we are facing several scientific-technical issues. The main challenge we are currently dealing with is how to ensure the findability across the nine different languages and all SSH disciplines.

Role of the Advisory Board

The Advisory Board is meant to be a flexible and rather informal group of experts that is going to work in an open, agile format. Your contribution would not be on a regular basis but mainly upon request from the TRIPLE Work Package Leaders Team. It will, for instance, involve answering specific questions via email, taking part in short surveys or attending (online) meetings to discuss and decide on current issues.

For instance, we would like 

1. to know, based on your knowledge and experience, whether the categories developed by the MORESS project are the best (albeit not perfect) ones to categorise the SSH disciplines.
2. to get your opinion on the current TRIPLE data model and whether it fits your discipline’s needs.
3. to assess the TRIPLE thesaurus, currently under construction, and the selection of scientific concepts per discipline as well as their translation in the different languages.

At the beginning of your work in this body, we would of course share more details about the TRIPLE project and the current stage of the platform development.

For you, the Advisory Board provides an excellent opportunity to develop collaborations and to be identified as an official contributor to the TRIPLE project. For us, it is an opportunity to exchange with future users and to develop something truly relevant for the SSH community.

We expect to have this body established in November 2020.

Please note that the work is voluntary and cannot be compensated.

Interested?

If you are interested in being part of this adventure and ready to join the Advisory Board, please contact the TRIPLE project coordinator, Suzanne Dumouchel, at Suzanne.Dumouchel[at]huma-num.fr.