The national contact point OPERAS-GER – a cooperation between OPERAS and the Max Weber Foundation – has started work. The new offering aims to anchor in the German science landscape the services and resources for scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities that OPERAS makes available at European level and to create intensive networking between the research infrastructures of the EU and Germany. Further aims are to strengthen open science and to promote the FAIR Data Principles.
Within the framework of the OPERAS-GER project, the Max Weber Foundation, which has been promoting open access in the social sciences and humanities since 2017, is planning a series of online seminars and lectures as well as application-oriented workshops for the new services as from June 2021. The project is based at the offices of the Max Weber Foundation and is being funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research for an initial period of three years as from October 2020.
OPERAS (Open Scholarly Communication in the European Research Area for Social Sciences and Humanities) makes infrastructure services available for research institutions, libraries and publishers, which, in the spirit of open science, serve to better organise research activities and to make research results more visible.
The Max Weber Foundation – German Humanities Institutes Abroad supports research primarily in the areas of history, cultural sciences, economics, and social sciences in selected countries with the purpose of promoting mutual understanding. It maintains ten institutes worldwide as well as other research groups and offices, and it provides infrastructures for research in the social sciences and humanities.