OPERAS-P (Preparation) project will support the development of OPERAS, the European Research infrastructure for open access publications in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). The project will further the development of the infrastructure in view of achieving the necessary scientific, technical and community maturity. To achieve this goal, OPERAS-P will address the necessary requirements according the Work Programme with three objectives: supporting the ESFRI application, start the implementation of innovative services, and support the expansion of the consortium. First objective will include the conceptual framework for a Governance plan, including a vision statement and two Landscape Studies: one per country, one for end-users. This work will include a business model addressing the long-term sustainability of the infrastructure. In parallel, this work will be supported by the implementation of the AISBL statutes in the infrastructure. The implementation of innovative services will address the development of a transnational access to publication services, based on the adoption of common standards, the interoperability between publishing services and bridging towards the EOSC marketplace. This work will rely on the problematics identified in the White Paper OPERAS-P will support the development of the consortium with an outreach strategy based on the Landscape Study. This body of work will stand in the continuity of the work already realized in former project OPERAS-D, in particular the Design Study.

HIRMEOS will improve five important publishing platforms for the open access monographs in the SSH and enhance their technical capacities and services, rendering technologies and content interoperable and embedding them fully into the European Open Science Cloud. The project focuses on the monograph as a significant mode of scholarly communication in the SSH and tackles the main obstacles of the full integration of important platforms supporting open access monographs and their contents. HIRMEOS will prototype innovative services for monographs in view of full integration in the European Open Science Cloud by providing additional data, links and interactions to the documents, paving the way to new potential tools for research assessment, which is still a major challenge in the SSH. The platforms participating (OpenEdition Books, OAPEN Library, EKT Open Book Press, Ubiquity Press and Göttingen University Press ) will be enriched with tools that enable identification, authentication and interoperability (DOI, ORCID, Fundref), and tools that enrich information and entity extraction (INRIA (N)ERD), the ability to annotate monographs (Hypothes.is), and gather usage and alternative metric data. HIRMEOS will also enrich the technical capacities of the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), a most significant indexing service for open access monographs globally, to receive automated information for ingestion, while it will also develop a structured certification system to document monograph peer-review. Partners will develop shared minimum standards for their monograph publications, such that allow the full embedding of technologies and content in the European Science Cloud. Finally, the project will have a catalyst effect in including more disciplines into the Open Science paradigm, widening its boundaries towards the SSH.