OPERAS (2023) Open scholarly communication for social sciences and humanities. Flyer, pp. 1–2.

OPERAS articulates a mature vision of open scholarly communication in which the Social Sciences and Humanities are not peripheral beneficiaries of European research infrastructure but constitutive agents of its intellectual diversity. As a non-profit organisation gathering more than fifty members across an extensive transnational map, it coordinates services, practices and technologies designed to answer the specific communication needs of SSH researchers within the European Research Area. Its strategic force lies in federation: rather than replacing local resources, OPERAS aggregates them into shared access points where scholars, libraries, publishers, policymakers and civic actors can encounter infrastructures otherwise dispersed by language, discipline or geography. The service ecosystem exemplifies this ambition: metrics platforms strengthen the visibility of open access monographs; GoTriple advances multilingual discovery across publications, datasets, profiles and projects; Pathfinder orients researchers towards appropriate publishing and service providers; and quality-assurance tools such as peer-review metadata increase trust in open access book publishing. The flyer’s first page visually reinforces this European breadth through a map of participating countries, while the second page specifies a practical architecture of analytics, discovery, quality assurance and research-for-society services. As a case synthesis, OPERAS demonstrates that scholarly openness is not reducible to free access; it requires multilingual discovery, transparent evaluation, sustainable publishing models and collaborative platforms linking research with society. Its definitive contribution is therefore infrastructural and cultural: it converts fragmented SSH communication into a federated, trustworthy and socially responsive knowledge commons.