Supporting the Open Access Monograph in the Humanities and Social Sciences: the HIRMEOS Project

The transition to Open Science requires more than a generic support for Open Access and forces us to consider the different challenges that the various publishing formats have to face. This applies in particular to the monograph which, while remaining the most important communication medium in the humanities and in the social sciences, is still peripheral in the Open Science environment. Indeed, the dissemination of monographs in Open Access encounters specific cultural, technical and economic barriers which the project HIRMEOS – aims to overcome by improving some digital platforms that already publish Open Access monographs. The guiding principle of the project is that making Open Access scholarly books more attractive for authors, readers and funding institutions means more than just releasing millions of Open Access documents in silos: it means creating bridges among countries and disciplines building an integrated trusted knowledge system. HIRMEOS – High Integration of Research Monographs in the European Open Science infrastructure – is a 30-month project funded under the Horizon2020 Programme of the European Commission and is part of a wider infrastructure project, OPERAS, aimed at integrating Social Science and Humanities within the European Open Science Cloud and transforming collections of passive documents into rich and interlinked content. The project is based upon five Open Access books publishing platforms globally giving access to more than 10 000 books: OpenEdition Books, OAPEN Library, EKT Open Book Press, Ubiquity Press and Göttingen University Press. During the course of the project these platforms are being enriched with tools that enable  identification, authentication and interoperability (DOI, ORCID, Fundref),  entity recognition and disambiguation (by INRIA entity-fishing),  annotation of digital monographs (by Hypothes.is),  certification of peer review processes (by DOAB),  gathering of usage and alternative metric data. The poster will give facts and figures about the involved platforms and their catalogues, the types of services to be implemented and the used standards, the expected benefit for the humanities and the social sciences and for the Open Science environment in general. More specifically, during our presentation we will focus on the results achieved in the work packages already concluded, i.e. those concerning the usage of persistent identifiers (WP2), the application of the entity recognition and disambiguation service in scholarly publishing (WP3) and the peer review certification system (WP4). To this end we will give information or practical demonstrations on  how persistent identificators improve the referencing of monographs and thus their discoverability and how the standardization of platforms by using the same persistent identifiers (ORCID, DOI, FundRef) enables better cross-linking between works and interoperability between different platforms;  how the service of automatic entity mining (NERD) makes it possible to develop visualization services (wordclouds, facets, etc.) that have been tested on the platforms involved in the project and that can help the users to find Open Access works of their interest;  how the specific peer review certification system used on the involved digital platforms can increase the confidence of authors and readers in the scientific quality of Open Access monographs.