May was a busy month for the OAPEN team who were active at several conferences, all in Poland. In this blog post, we share some of the highlights and what came from our involvement in them.
PCG Academic Conference
From 12-13 May, members of the OAPEN Tech Team participated in The Big Migration, “On the road to the next generation of scientific repositories”, at the University of Warsaw in Poland. The Big Migration 2026 focused on the major transformations shaping today’s repository landscape – from large-scale migrations to DSpace 8 and DSpace 9 and DSpace-CRIS, through legacy-to-modern transitions, to the integration of AI-driven tools and enhanced metadata interoperability.
The conference programme was packed with digital repositories sharing their experiences, challenges, and achievements in migrating from legacy versions of DSpace to newer versions. Experts working across AI bots and traffic, DSpace, metadata, and related areas were also present, making it a valuable opportunity to learn from others facing similar questions.
Alongside learning from the experiences of other institutions, we came to the conference with two main questions: how can we better manage AI traffic without blocking useful access or disrupting human users of our repositories and how can we migrate smoothly from DSpace 6.3 to DSpace 9+, including where we should pay particular attention and which approaches might help.
We were able to discuss both topics in depth and received useful recommendations, tips, and guidance. These conversations helped us to evolve our ideas and improve our understanding of the challenges ahead.
OPERAS & SCIROS Conference 2026
The OPERAS & SCIROS 2026 Conference took place from 20-21 May in Warsaw, Poland. It was hosted by the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL PAN), a core member of OPERAS Research Infrastructure and the National Node for Poland.
OAPEN is a founding member of OPERAS, and our managing Director, Niels Stern, also serves on the Executive Assembly. OPAEN also co-coordinates the Dutch National Node, OPERAS-NL, alongside the Humanities Cluster of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). We were delighted to be involved in the conference this year on several fronts and hope to share some of the key highlights and takeaways from the event in this blog post.
Day 1
On the first day of the conference, Anna Wałek (Head of Technology) and Wiktor Florian co-led the workshop, “From OMP to DOAB, via Thoth: Open Collaboration to Amplify Slovenian OA Books”. During the workshop, Aleš Pogačnik, Editor-in-Chief at ZRC SAZU highlighted how the three Slovenian presses, that form the OPERAS-SL National Node, use of Open Monograph Press (OMP), including challenges around publishing open access (OA) books and exporting metadata. Attendees also shared their experiences, highlighting common issues with OMP, metadata, and OA publishing.
We see a clear opportunity to make it easier for publishers to share content with DOAB and OAPEN. PKP is exploring a plugin for Open Monograph Press (OMP) that would enable direct exports, offering a simple alternative for those who cannot or prefer not to use intermediaries.
At the same time, several university presses, particularly in Poland and Croatia, are looking for more straightforward ways to work with us, including via FTP or SWORD, and using formats such as CSV or JSON. These are relatively low effort improvements that could significantly widen participation, and some presses are even keen to support their development.
During the afternoon of 20 May, Graham Stone (Head of International Projects) had a double billing of panels, first chairing “Rebuilding Scholarly Publishing: Institutional Infrastructures and Diamond OA in Europe” and then participating in “OPERAS National nodes: developing European Infrastructure at the national level”.
As books lead of the AEGIS-OA project, it was exciting to hear about Diamond OA developments across the European Research Area and to see the clear need for Diamond OA and research assessment reform to link to affect real change.
As well as presenting OPERAS-NL on the national Nodes panel, Graham then presented a poster on the Node at the evening reception in the wonderful Museum of Warsaw. It was a great opportunity to talk to delegates and representatives of other nodes and to exchange ideas and experiences.
Anna and Wiktor also present a poster on the Peer Review Information Service for Monographs (PRISM), a free service provided by OPERAS and hosted by the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB).
Day 2
On the second day of the conference, Anna gave the keynote speech, “Who Owns the Airspace of Knowledge? From Openness to Agency, Trust, and Sustainable Ground Operations”. In the keynote, Anna used a metaphor of aviation to highlight the gap between global visibility and the infrastructures that support it, stressing the need for community governed systems, transparent metadata, and trusted frameworks that ensure not just access, but long‑term stewardship of scholarly knowledge.
Anna and Wiktor participated in one of the final panel sessions of the conference, “Organizing Knowledge in the Open Science Ecosystem: Metadata, Data Citation, and Trust Frameworks”. During the session, they presented recent work by OAPEN’s technical team on an automated metadata pipeline. Their presentation, “Metadata Quality as a Shared Effort: Collaborative Innovation for Discoverability and Bibliodiversity”, continued the airspace metaphor from the keynote speech.
While not all attendees may have wanted to take a flight, the presentation sparked valuable discussions about different routes into DOAB and the OAPEN Library, including the use of the SWORD protocol. It also led to questions about whether we have plans, or are involved in initiatives, to make greater use of AI in the future. We are already in contact with parties interested in other types of deposit. In terms of AI, we have many ideas, although some other matters currently have a more urgent priority.
The conference was a great opportunity to meet and talk to over 170 delegates from the whole OPERAS community and discuss services, National Nodes, projects and the future of OPERAS as it journeys along the road to becoming an ERIC as part of the OPERAS PRIME project. Two key highlights, apart from the opportunity to present in so many sessions, was the announcement that Canada will join the OPERAS Executive Assembly, represented by erudit as new core members, and also the confirmation in the opening keynote that Poland intends to host the OPERAS ERIC.
An overview of the full conference programme can be found on the OPERAS website and recordings from the event on YouTube.
OPERAS has over 70 members in 25 countries, and we at OAPEN would strongly recommend organizations to apply for OPERAS ordinary membership to join the community.
About OPERAS
OPERAS is the Research Infrastructure supporting open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in the European Research Area. Its mission is to coordinate and federate resources in Europe to efficiently address the scholarly communication needs of European researchers in the field of SSH.
OPERAS-NL is the Dutch National Node within the European OPERAS network. It is coordinated by the OAPEN Foundation (OAPEN) and the KNAW Humanities Cluster.