The OAPEN Foundation and KNAW Humanities Cluster are collaborating to establish OPERAS-NL, the Dutch National Node within the European OPERAS Research Infrastructure network.
What does this mean for the Dutch social sciences and humanities community?
OPERAS-NL will serve as the connection point between the European OPERAS infrastructure and the Dutch SSH research landscape. It will provide:
· Information and support for OPERAS services
· Networking and events for researchers, publishers, and libraries
· Improved international visibility for Dutch SSH research.
OPERAS is the Research Infrastructure dedicated to supporting open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in the European Research Area. Its mission is to coordinate and federate resources in Europe to efficiently address the scholarly communication needs of European researchers in the field of SSH to make Open Science a reality.
OPERAS is now on its path to becoming operational as an ERIC in 2028. By fulfilling its mission, OPERAS provides the research community with the missing brick it needs to find, access, create, edit, disseminate, and easily and efficiently validate SSH outputs across Europe.
OPERAS doesn’t overlap with DARIAH, CESSDA and CLARIN as OPERAS is not a research data or research tool infrastructure. Rather, it is an expansion to existing infrastructures. At a European level, OPERAS currently cooperates with DARIAH, CESSDA and CLARIN, on a national level OPERAS-NL can connect to ODISSEI, CLARIAH-NL, EHRI-NL and E-RIHS for the Dutch Science Foundation’s Large Scale Research Infrastructure roadmap for the SSH-domain.
The board of OPERAS-NL shares a Supervisory Board member and a Steering Board member of the independent Dutch OpenJournals.nl consortium. It’s the ambition of OPERAS-NL to formalise a joint endeavour.
As a National Node, OPERAS-NL can provide tailored support and training for OPERAS services to SSH researchers in the Netherlands. It can also help collaboration beyond national borders in the European Research Area. OPERAS-NL is one of 13 National Nodes connecting European initiatives with local research communities.
International collaboration, funding and Citizen Science
Two OPERAS services can directly help the Dutch research community with establishing international collaboration, finding funding and Citizen Science projects
GoTriple is the European hub for SSH. It was developed thanks to the Horizon 2020 EU TRIPLE project and is a multilingual platform (GoTriple’s material is available in 11 languages) tailored for the in-depth exploration of SSH research.
As well as nearly 20 million documents, GoTriple lists over 25 thousand projects and over 22 million authors. GoTriple makes it possible to carry out multilingual searches and thus find publications in a given language by using keywords in one of the supported languages. This means that by searching for a term in Spanish, it is possible to find publications containing the same term not only in the language of the search but also in other languages.
GoTriple allows the possibility of interdisciplinary (and also multicultural and multilingual) collaboration between researchers, specialists and translators from different areas of SSH.
Therefore, Dutch researchers can use GoTriple to find relevant publications, projects and authors that are otherwise scattered across local repositories.
This is further explained in a series of use cases in an article available in French and English: Susanna Fiorini (March 10, 2023). The GoTriple platform as a tool to support scientific translation. OPERAS. https://doi.org/10.58079/sjp3
VERA, is an online platform where SSH researchers and other collaborators can find each other to do participatory research. Partners can build projects together, find tools that facilitate collaboration among team members, and discover funding opportunities to support the project’s goals.
The collaborative platform and matching tool support SSH researchers in building citizen science projects with professional and non-professional researchers to tackle social issues together. VERA also provides suggestions of tailored funding opportunities, which could be of relevance to Dutch researchers.
Diamond Open Access
OPERAS is firmly committed to Diamond Open Access (OA). In 2022, it jointly launched the Diamond Open Access Action Plan, which proposed to align and develop common resources for the entire Diamond OA ecosystem, while respecting the cultural, multilingual, and disciplinary diversity that constitutes the strength of the sector.
The European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH), an OPERAS programme, includes the Diamond Open Access Standard, a tool suite of resources and guides, and a registry of Diamond OA publishers. The EDCH aims to deliver to the European research community an aligned, high-quality, and sustainable OA scholarly communication infrastructure, capable of implementing OA as a standard publication practice.
Disinformation and fostering trust in SSH research
In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, the challenges of disinformation and the erosion of public trust have reached critical levels. The rise of digital platforms and artificial intelligence, while offering tremendous potential, has also enabled the proliferation of false and misleading information at an unprecedented scale.
In 2025, OPERAS published a landmark report titled ‘Fostering Trust in the Digital Age’. Featuring 27 papers from the TrustOn2024 Workshop and a session at the Science Summit at the 79th United Nations General Assembly, this report brings together insights from experts on combating disinformation and strengthening trust in science and digital ecosystems.
PRISM (Peer Review Information Service for Monographs) is an OPERAS service provided by the Directory of Open Access Books, it contributes to building trust in open access book publishing by improving transparency around the quality assurance process. PRISM gives publishers the opportunity to display information about their peer review procedures in a standardised way as part of the book’s metadata in the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) as well as on their own website
Benefits of OPERAS membership
OPERAS ordinary membership is free but is subject to application and acceptance of the rules of participation.
OPERAS Membership allows institutions to join a thriving community of members across the European Research Area and beyond. Members can join OPERAS Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and participate in the Assembly of the Commons, one of OPERAS’ governing bodies.
Potential Dutch publishing members of OPERAS would be able to use services such as Pathfinder, a platform providing a catalogue of publishing and editorial services offered by OPERAS members. It guides editors, editorial managers, and authors to discover the best service to fit their demands, whether the goal is to publish journals, books, or other research outputs.