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!

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.

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

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.

In early June, TRIPLE signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with NEANIAS with the aim to foster a collabaration between two projects which are financed under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation action funding scheme INFRAEOSC-02-2019 “Prototyping new innovative services”. This makes NEANIAS and TRIPLE two complementary European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) projects in the domain of Open Science.

The acronym NEANIAS stands for “Novel EOSC services for Emerging Atmosphere, Underwater and Space Challenges”. The NEANIAS project, which lasts 36 months and involves 20 partners from 9 European countries, is a focused Open Science project in the field of co-design and delivery of innovative thematic services, derived from state-of-the-art research assets and practices in three major sectors: Underwater, atmospheric and space research.

Considering the fact that NEANIAS and TRIPLE are two initiatives in the field of data research, the MoU is targeted at bilateral information exchange and collaboration. This will benefit the respective goals of both projects, especially in the areas of communication & outreach, dissemination, validation and exploitation activities. It will ultimately help us join forces in our Open Science ambitions.

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!

The 1st TRIPLE ThatCamp is happening on 11 May 2021: “Discovering Discovery: Envision your ideal ecosystem for exploring research resources”.  It’s a free, 1-day, online “unconference” for Open Science enthusiasts from all disciplines and professions to share concepts, strategies and resources for discovering research and getting research discovered.  Participants will brainstorm together, identify roadblocks, raise concerns and dream up solutions on a peer-to-peer level. 

ThatCamp stands for “The Humanities And Technology Camp”. It is a so-called unconference based on the BarCamp concept: 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. People engage with each other to “create, build, write, hack, and solve problems” (https://thatcamp.org/about/index.html). The event will be hosted using Zoom for video conferencing and Miro, a virtual collaborative whiteboard tool.

The session time slots are planned out, but session topics and formats are defined by the participants. Whether you are currently working on a project, article or talk, and would like others to join writing a draft paper collaboratively, or have a story to share on which you’d like to hear other participants’ opinions, or like to put a problem up for discussion and look for solutions together – whatever it is, everyone is invited to submit a suggestion. At the beginning of the event, those willing to lead a session will be asked to pitch their idea (30-60 seconds, depending on the number of suggestions), and participants will then vote on the topics that will actually find their way onto the agenda.

You can already add your ideas to our virtual Miro whiteboard (you’ll get a link to the board when you sign up) to jumpstart the process.

The number of participants is limited, so we would advise you to register early. The event will be held in English, it’s free and open to all those interested in Open Science and the notion of “discovery”.

Learn more about the event and register here no later than 10th of May.

Questions? Contact us at triple@operas-eu.org.

TRIPLE will organise a total of three ThatCamps over the course of the project (2019-2023), bringing together people who have an interest in Open Science in the social sciences and humanities (SSH): researchers, universities and other research institutions, publishers, libraries and Open Access repositories, but also non-academic groups such as IT experts, public authorities and policy makers, media, SMEs, NGOs and citizens. Each TRIPLE ThatCamp will address a specific overarching theme which relates, for instance, to Digital Humanities, discovery technologies, scientific communication, societal impact of research in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) or internationalisation of research.

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Image source
Light bulb: Photo by SUNBEAM PHOTOGRAPHY on Unsplash  (CC0)

On 30 March 2021, the TRIPLE Open Science Training Series start with in event co-organised with CLARIN ERIC, one of the TRIPLE consortium members: the “CLARIN Café on the Rights of Data Subjects in Language Resources“.

It is the task of Work package 6 “Open Science and EOSC Integration” to organise and deliver specific training events dedicated to Open Science related topics. The events of these series were originally targeted at TRIPLE project team members only, in order to ensure they all have competencies in Open Science practices and workflows. However, it has been decided to open the events to the whole SSH community.

In order to strengthen TRIPLE’s connections and collaborations with other projects, initiatives and Research Infrastructures, some events are co-organised.

Click here to find an overview of all upcoming Open Science training events.