OPER3D is a one-year project funded by the NWO Open Science Fund aimed at exploring Open Publication and Peer Review for 3D Scholarship.

3D technologies for the digitisation, modelling, and simulation of data are being widely used in fields including heritage, history, archaeology, architecture, forensics, and engineering. However, the challenges of publishing and peer-reviewing such works have been inadequately addressed due to the absence of standards and the fragile technology ecosystem of that scholarship. 3D still lags behind text-based research outputs in terms of its acceptance within traditional scholarly paradigms: what institutions value as research outputs. Therefore, for 3D to take its place as a recognised scholarly output, it requires open and transparent systems and workflows for publication and peer review.

OPER3D will address these by 1) analysing the challenges and opportunities of publishing 3D scholarship; 2) exploring peer review of 3D data and outputs; 3) situating 3D publishing within developments for revisiting research assessment. It will do this through the research infrastructure, PURE3D, in which scholarly arguments are embedded in and driven-by 3D models. OPER3D will uniquely position PURE3D to become a quality-assured national infrastructure for the evaluation, publication, and recognition of 3D Scholarship.

The OPER3D Project is based out of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University under the direction of Dr. Costas Papadopoulos.

To learn more about the outputs of this project, check the pages under ”Publish with Us”