Author: Magdalena Wnuk
Reviewers: Françoise Gouzi, Sy Holsinger

Small, independent projects, tools or services deal with sustainability challenges different from those faced by large research infrastructures. What they lack is a stable, relatively modest funding, that would be sufficient to hire someone who will responsibly maintain and update the output (tool or service), as well as adapt it to the changing needs of the audience. 

Maintaining a digital research output appears to be one of the biggest challenges of digital transformation in academia (Barats i in., 2020). Although social science and humanities (SSH) have never been particularly devoted to informatisation of its sources and achievements, in the last decades, there has been a proliferation of digital outputs in those fields (ALLEA, All European Academies, 2023; ALLEA Working Group E-Humanities, 2020; Avanço, Karla i in., 2021). Encouraged by European and national funders’ politics, fostering digital transformation in science, and strengthened by scholars’ own interest in computation methods, different kinds of digital outputs have been produced. Many of those digital achievements are relatively small, independent projects, not necessarily supported by research infrastructures. Therefore, after the funding period or because of changing conditions in parent institutions, their case is difficult to advocate for. 

At the OPERAS Innovation Lab, we aim to find solutions to sustainability problems of various digital projects. Currently, we are working on the assessment of innovative projects as a part of a case study conducted in WP4 of the OPERAS-PLUS project. Our focus is on SSH scholarly communication practices, tools and services in social sciences and humanities (SSH). We collected 4 cases: 

• OAPEN recommender system (see Ronald’s Snijder post on it) 
• DARIAH Overlay journal “Transformations” (presented recently on Observatory by Françoise Gouzi)
• SHAPE-ID
• Journal of Digital History

Among them the SHAPE-ID toolkit is a perfect example of the point made above – below we present its case. 

SHAPE-ID toolkit: a smart guide to dispersed resources

SHAPE-ID toolkit (https://www.shapeidtoolkit.eu/) can be simply described as a website helping researchers and other users find their way through various resources on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary methodologies and approaches. It collects and organises resources to provide pathways for various stakeholders to understand what’s needed on different levels of inter- and transdiciplinarity in ASSH (arts, social sciences and humanities). Its biggest and most interesting achievement are guided pathways allowing exploration of the resources from two entry points: a role played by a user in the academia and an objective (goal) of the research. As the creators say on the toolkit’s website, SHAPE-ID toolkit is “a collection of ASHH resources organised around goals users might want to achieve, such as understanding IDR/TDR (interdisciplinary/transdisciplinary research), funding collaborative research, evaluating IDR/TDR or developing IDR/TDR research skills.” 

Users can choose four pathways based on a role they play: researcher, representative of a research organisation, policymaker/funder or partner from other sectors. When one chooses a policymaker path, the next step the SHAPE-ID toolkit points out various objectives a policymaker might wish to achieve, such as “understand inter- and transdisciplinary research”. Only choosing one of the objectives will guide the user to concrete resources. 

It is of course possible to get to the resources without choosing the guided pathways. 

The SHAPE-ID toolkit was built as a part of a larger project funded by the EU (https://www.shapeid.eu/about/). As many similar pursuits, it faced maintenance problems after the funding was finished. According to the creators, the website is popular and there was a positive response to the outcome of the project, however, it cannot count on additional support other than hosting provided by the Trinity College. Though the application itself is relatively simple and does need costly maintenance, keeping the website up-to-date by checking whether resources and links to them are valid or adding new content, is a challenge. The creators will not receive additional funding for maintaining the website, and consequently, it will affect the toolkit’s usefulness. Since the SHAPE-ID toolkit is more than just a website, it seems like a waste of effort and time leaving it unsupported. 

A case for technical and intellectual sustainability

With growing interest in digital scholarly communication practices, maintaining digital research outputs became a burning issue. Though those projects come in various shapes and sizes, they often carry a similar burden – they lack stable funding and slowly lose their usability and validity. SHAPE-ID is a small initiative built within an international project and then rooted at one research institution. More than further development, it needs funding for maintenance and staff (often consisting of one person) employed to keep the innovative tool viable and useful. As this case shows, innovation needs resources to maintain its technical usability and its intellectual value. We tend to think of those resources as funding, as if it was enough to keep the project going. But it seems it is more than that: funding itself is dependent on the structure within which innovation was built, the structure affects technical and intellectual capacity as well. Let’s take the example of the SHAPE-ID toolkit once again: with a strong intellectual potential of its creators, the tool is maintained as a part of the institutional online services, but in a few years, when the application is affected by technological debt, it will need intervention that will not be provided by the institution (at least likely).  

In other cases, sustainability might be dependent on other factors. However, those factors would affect either technological capacities of innovators, or intellectual potential behind the projects and ability to maintain it. Studying cases with similar challenges as the SHAPE-ID toolkit, might provide answers to what is needed and how it should be provided.

All posts about OPERAS Innovation Lab case studies can be found here.