Insights from the OPERAS-SCIROS conference
Author: Maaike Duine (ORCID iD)
How can Open Science Communities within the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) be better connected to strengthen collaboration and knowledge exchange? And how can we drive Open Science (OS) forward? To answer these questions – and many more – the OPERAS (Open scholarly communication in the European Research Area for Social Sciences and Humanities) Research Infrastructure and the SCIROS (Strategic Collaboration for Interdisciplinary Research on Open Science in the SSH) project jointly organized a conference that took place in the impressive Staszic Palace in Warsaw, Poland. OPERAS was established to address scholarly communication needs of European SSH researchers. The SCIROS research network was launched in 2024 to strengthen OS practices within SSH.
Recommended citation: Duine, M. (2026). Strengthening and Shaping Openness in Social Sciences and Humanities. Open Research Blog Berlin. https://doi.org/10.59350/9vdaj-6dq86
I attended the conference to find out how infrastructures for Open Science driven by “values of inclusion, scholarly-driven governance, and community interaction” respond to the underlying structural and systemic issues confronting the SSH field. Through its main conference theme, “One network, many possibilities,” a wide variety of topics was covered. The full conference program can be found here, and presentation slides and posters are included on Zenodo.
Looking back and forward to shape the future of openness
Over the course of the two-day conference, 76 years of OS history was collected in a participatory exercise: the Open Science timeline. By creating the timeline, initiators Alessia Smaniotto and Kelly Achenbach wanted to increase the visibility of diverse OS stakeholders and to foster collective ownership. By looking back into the past, the timeline showed an impressive amount of implemented OS policies and guidelines, and established Open Research infrastructures, initiatives and repositories, such as the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH), the Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN) and many more.
In the first keynote “Four Keys to Driving Open Science Forward”, John Willinsky (Public Knowledge Project) also said we should reflect on the past more often when looking at the future of Open Science. He framed OS historically around four key concepts: Integration, Access, Trust and Law, and showed how the historic meaning of these concepts can help us advance OS today. Integration with different learning systems from outside of Europe, led to new ways of thinking at European universities. Currently, Open Access and multilingualism are global forms of knowledge integration, with for example over 60 languages in Open Journal Systems (OJS). Willinsky stressed: ‘If we are not integrating multilingualism into our systems, we are not using knowledge optimally.’ Access to e.g. publications currently follows through rich metadata, which can also be seen when looking back at history: For example, the development of musical notation about 1,000 years ago; this made music sharing possible. Trust in science was enabled when print emerged. Recently, the Public Knowledge Project created a Publication Facts Label as a common reference point for journal articles to rebuild trust. The fourth concept Willinsky saw essential for driving OS forward is law. Old copyright laws are still being applied today, for content that is changing fast, e.g. what counts as a publication today? And how can we better address legal questions that come up with e.g. AI integrations?
Towards a European Culture of Openness: The Role of the Social Sciences and Humanities
Responsibility of research communities was addressed at a panel discussion on research security and digital sovereignty. It was noted that openness and transparency can help to manage risks through quality control and with community standards; Openness does not automatically mean there are security conflicts. One of the panelists pointed out that the real risk would be unmanaged data. The panel also discussed the role of SSH in shaping openness. Panelists agreed that SSH researchers are enablers of dialogue and can help to create a culture of openness. The tradition of criticism, diverse perspectives and care about human relations in SSH research will help shape OS. The panel concluded: There is a need to push for critical thinking, and see OS as a path of diplomacy in which open collaboration and multilingualism, historic and cultural memories are preserved.
Multilingualism
Language diversity and multilingualism have been central concerns in scholarly communication since the Helsinki Initiative was launched in 2019. The OPERAS Special Interest Group (SIG) on multilingualism plays a role in sustaining and advancing GoTriple, the European Social Sciences and Humanities hub, alongside developing a multilingual discovery tool. Multilingualism continued to be an important topic throughout the conference as scholarly communication is still dominated by English: Close to half of the journals using OJS published articles primarily in English. The global reach of scholarly publishing is much broader than commonly assumed, which means it needs to be reassessed on a significantly larger scale.
Several multilingual platforms were presented as examples of how the dominance of English in scholarly communication is being addressed at national and regional levels. The Polish Studies Newsletter, for instance, serves as a multilingual infrastructure for Central European Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) communication, making not only Open Access publications available, but also information on events and research projects. Responsible AI was identified as having real potential to support multilingualism in scholarly communication, provided it is community-led. The Platform French translations and Open Science with automated translations to increase discoverability of research, was presented as a concrete example of how AI can serve this goal in practice.
The Role of Artificial Intelligence
OPERAS Artificial Intelligence Special Interest Group (AI SIG) was established in 2025 and aims to promote the responsible use of AI in scholarly communication. This was discussed in various presentations. Maxim Kupreyev presented systematizing data services within the OPERAS ecosystem as a technical path toward greater transparency in scholarly infrastructure. A key concern raised was that Diamond OA publishers are the most exposed to AI-driven content discovery, yet have the least resources to respond to the challenges this brings. Trustworthy AI that complies with the principles of Open Science must be actively and collectively promoted. A recent landscape scan by Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) maps the challenges and strategies for bridging AI companies and open curated collections.
Importance of community-led initiatives
For the humanities and social sciences, early scholar-led publishing initiatives that experimented with the emerging digital medium are of particular importance. The term ‚community-led initiatives‘ encompasses a variety of actors, such as independent scholars, affiliated academics, library publishers, or scholarly associations, who are seeking independence from the control exerted by large corporate publishers.
The importance of community-led initiatives ran as a thread through several sessions and was also demonstrated during the poster session. Carolina Manfredini presented the University of Milan as a case study of how institutions can respond to fragmented national Open Science infrastructures. In Italy, unstable funding for short-term projects and fragmented OS governance have prompted an institutional response: the University of Milan University Press now publishes OA SSH journals, and has established an interconnected open infrastructure that will be further developed through sustained national investment. Faïta Ioanna pointed out how French Open Science policies are not well-suited to the needs of SSH communities and risk marginalizing them. Ivan Lambov called for broader involvement of secondary stakeholders, such as governments, media, businesses, funders, policy makers, and non-profit organisations, to build a more equitable research ecosystem for SSH, proposing concrete measures like mandated stakeholder diversity, reformed assessment metrics, formal multi-stakeholder advisory bodies, and greater transparency.
Open Peer Review and Research Assessment
In 2017 OPERAS called Open Peer Review (OPR) “the buzz word of the moment in the scholarly communication sector” while still remaining marginal to traditional blind peer review. Quality judgements in the humanities and social sciences are situated within small, discipline-specific epistemic cultures, meaning that what counts as rigorous or convincing scholarship varies considerably from one field to another. Within these cultures, editorial curation plays a central role, as editors act as key gatekeepers who shape review processes according to the norms and expectations of their particular community. As a result, book peer review in particular emerges as a diverse and often not fully transparent practice, since procedures differ widely across publishers and disciplines and are rarely made explicit to authors or readers. Against this backdrop, open peer review has yet to become an established norm and remains largely at the experimental stage, with its broader adoption in the SSH still uncertain. While OPR tends to make reviewers more constructive in their feedback, it can also make them less critical, which raises its own concerns for research quality. Importantly, during the conference it was emphasized that there is no single way to implement OPR, and that one of its key benefits is fostering more open scholarly conversations. The OpenEdition platform was mentioned as an example that supports this kind of open dialogue. One recommendation from OPERAS is that publicly owned, inclusive information management systems that support a wide variety of content types are essential for putting in place responsible research metrics—ones that remain transparent and stay under the control of research communities.
European Legal Framework
A second panel explored the future of the European Research Area (ERA) and the question of how Europe can remain ‚as open as possible‘ while being ‚as closed as necessary‘ and, who gets to decide what that means in practice. The discussion centered on the opportunities that the ERA Act would present for Open Science. The ERA Act is scheduled to be adopted before 2027 and aims to turn Europe’s fragmented research landscape into a legally binding, integrated system with shared investment targets, alignment of policies and improved mobility for researchers. A stronger legal framework, that would be created with the adoption of the ERA Act, could create opportunities for advancing Open Science. Unequal access to Open Access publications across European countries was mentioned as an ongoing concern. The ERA Act, panelists agreed, has the potential to bring greater equality in this regard. The discussion also touched on broader challenges to openness, including geopolitical tensions, digital sovereignty, and the rapidly evolving role of AI in research. On behalf of European universities, research-performing organisations, libraries, scholarly infrastructures, and academies of sciences and humanities a joint statement on these issues has been published by six European organisations – ALLEA, EIFL, IFLA, LIBER, OPERAS, and SPARC Europe. In this statement it is also stressed that equitable participation across disciplines and multilingual research dissemination should be supported, and formally recognized. KnowledgeRights21 recently published a blogpost explaining why ‘a fully-fledged secondary publication right’ should be included in the ERA Act.
What Can We Take Away for the Open Research Office Berlin?
All in all, over the course of two days the OPERAS community showed the importance of keeping in mind that Open Science is not just about data and outputs, but that SSH researchers in particular can contribute to building a culture of openness, by bringing in diverse perspectives, and community values. There is still work to do to further advance Open Research in SSH, such as connecting existing initiatives to create a more resilient OS framework, and supporting research assessment reform initiatives like CoARA.
The OPERAS innovation Lab is currently developing IMeTo (Impact Measurement Tool): this tool will support the creation of SSH impact narratives by combining several workflows with an AI based workflow. Linking impact narratives with the development of quality indicators for reforming research assessment is also a point of interest for further developing Open Research in Berlin, as described in the recently published position paper.
Another key take-away is that community-led initiatives are essential for creating an inclusive, equitable open research landscape. Multilingualism and bibliodiversity are important aspects in creating a more inclusive and equitable scholarly ecosystem for the future, this means for example supporting and recognizing innovative publishing platforms and research outputs in German.
For me, the main take-away from the conference is that, even though change may seem slow and many challenges still remain, looking back and reflecting on the past will show us what has already been achieved. When we do this more often, and acknowledge and celebrate accomplishments achieved through collaborating and connecting communities, there is reason to be optimistic about the future.