Voices of OPERAS UK is a blog series spotlighting the members of OPERAS based in the UK. Each feature introduces a member organisation through the same five quick questions.
OPERAS is a European Research Infrastructure (RI) that supports open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) across the European Research Area. Its mission is to bring together and coordinate resources across Europe, helping researchers communicate their work more effectively.
Introducing Jisc
In June, we caught up with Anna Vernon, Head of Research Licensing.
Tell us a little bit about your organisation and your role within it?
Shared approaches to digital infrastructure, technology services and collective licensing help research institutions secure better value, greater transparency and more sustainable access to the content, software, tools and platforms that underpin research and teaching. I lead our research licensing team and negotiations and set the strategic direction of our portfolio – alongside our sector partners, funders and strategic groups.
There is growing recognition at an institutional and policy level of the need for a more open, affordable and resilient research ecosystem. Strategic supplier engagement and support for community-governed infrastructure are essential to achieving this, helping to reduce duplicated effort across the sector and enabling institutions to make informed technology decisions through shared approaches to supplier assurance, due diligence and risk management.
Today, the challenges facing research institutions extend well beyond pricing and licence terms. Research security, accessibility, sustainability, governance and the implications of emerging technologies are becoming increasingly vital. As research infrastructure becomes more interconnected and complex, collective assurance is becoming just as important as collective purchasing. Our goal is to provide institutions and communities with trusted information, shared expertise and practical frameworks that support confident, well-informed decision-making.
When and why did your organisation join OPERAS?
Jisc joined OPERAS in 2019 as a founding Core Member representing the UK. Many UK organisations involved in OPERAS were already Jisc members or long-standing partners – making it a natural fit.
We initially engaged through our work on open access books and scholarly communication, but OPERAS plays a much broader role. It brings together communities that build, govern and sustain the infrastructure that supports open scholarship, particularly in the social sciences and humanities. I see strong parallels between the challenges of sustaining open scholarship infrastructure and those faced by the Research Software Engineering community as highlighted through the work of the Software Sustainability Institute.
How does Jisc engage with OPERAS today?
As the UK Core Member, we participate in the Executive Assembly (EA), help shape the strategic direction of the infrastructure and connect UK organisations to opportunities across the wider European network. We are members of the Open Access Books Special Interest Group, helping explore sustainable business models, open infrastructure and broader challenges around interoperability, governance, preservation, discoverability and long-term sustainability.
These working groups also provide an important assurance function. By bringing together organisations facing common challenges around sustainability, metadata, governance, preservation and transparency, OPERAS enables members to share expertise, develop community-led recommendations and reduce duplicated effort at a European level.
We host and coordinate OPERAS UK, bringing together UK based organisations through workshops, events and networking activities. This helps members engage with the wider OPERAS community and other European initiatives, exchange expertise and ideas, and develop new collaborations.
Alongside this community-building role, we have contributed to several OPERAS projects, such as OPERAS PLUS, PALOMERA and DIAMAS. We are partners in OPERAS PRIME which marks the next stage of the PLUS project and will achieve the organisational and operational readiness to become an official European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC). WP11 activity supports the growth and development of national nodes in each member country; OPERAS UK has already recruited a Services Ambassador who will play a major role is scaling up the use and impact of OPERAS services within the UK.
These projects translate community discussions into practical frameworks and guidance. DIAMAS, for example, helped establish best practices for sustainable Diamond OA journal publishing (work continues through the European Diamond Capacity Hub and the AEGIS-OA project), while PALOMERA delivered actionable recommendations to support and coordinate aligned funder and institutional policies for OA books, and resources to support the speeding up of the transition to OA for books across Europe.
Why is OPERAS particularly relevant now?
Research is increasingly dependent on digital infrastructure at a time when institutions face financial pressure, rising technology costs and growing reliance on a small number of global providers. Challenges such as affordability, interoperability, governance and sustainability including technical debt cannot be addressed by institutions acting alone; they require collective approaches and shared infrastructure. At the same time, institutions often repeat the same supplier assessments, governance reviews and procurement exercises, creating significant duplication across the sector.
OPERAS provides a collaboration framework that allows organisations to share expertise, coordinate investment and build on existing services rather than developing solutions in isolation. Just as importantly, it creates space to share knowledge on governance, sustainability and trust, helping ensure that infrastructure remains resilient, interoperable and community-led.
OPERAS also reflects many of the principles that are becoming increasingly important across the research infrastructure landscape: collaboration, openness, community governance, interoperability and long-term sustainability. For example, OPERAS services, such as GoTriple and Vera, and projects such as GRAPHIA and LUMEN, will advance the discovery of SSH research, the use of SSH data and foster cross-domain collaboration.
Through its services, projects, governance model and collaboration with other European RIs, OPERAS demonstrates how trusted scholarly infrastructure can be governed and sustained through shared stewardship and transparency. This aligns closely with our growing focus on collective assurance. Whether assessing research workflow tools, scholarly communication platforms, AI-enabled services or infrastructure providers, the challenge is often the same: reducing duplication while establishing shared expectations around transparency, accessibility, interoperability, sustainability and governance. OPERAS provides a valuable environment in which to develop and test these approaches at European scale.
For the UK, active participation in European RIs remains vital. It allows UK organisations not only to collaborate internationally but also to help shape the standards, governance models and strategic direction of infrastructures that increasingly underpin global research. OPERAS is part of the second wave of candidate nodes joining the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Federation. This is a vital step in connecting researchers, publishers, repositories and citizens, ensuring that SSH scholarly communication is fully integrated into the EOSC ecosystem, strengthening connections across European networks and increasing the visibility and impact of UK research.
How would you like to see OPERAS UK develop?
The PRIME project is an opportunity to grow the UK community further. We want OPERAS UK to become more than a place for information exchange: a community that develops partnerships, projects and funding bids, and helps shape services and strategy across the network.
We would particularly like to see stronger engagement from communities that may not traditionally see themselves as part of the scholarly communication landscape. As discussions increasingly focus on digital infrastructure, governance, sustainability and open science, there are opportunities for a much wider range of organisations to contribute and benefit.
To learn more about OPERAS UK, upcoming events and opportunities to get involved, visit the Jisc website or contact the coordination team directly. We are always happy to discuss membership, collaboration opportunities and how OPERAS connects with the wider European research infrastructure landscape.
Find out more
Stay tuned for more posts in the series, coming soon! If you are interested in your organisation joining OPERAS, or just finding out a bit more, get in touch via email. You can keep up to date with UK member activities via our mailing list – sign up to the JiscMail.
