The following report, OPERAS Design Study, has been composed thanks to the OPERAS-D project, in its first stage. The report joins all the studies that explore the landscape of OPERAS’ field of activity, analyse the visibility of Open Access monographs, establish the technical mapping of the OPERAS Consortium, survey users’ needs regarding scientific communication and academic publishing, present the services's portfolio and their roadmap, and finally look ahead to the development of the governance structure, business and legal model of the future infrastructure within the ESFRI framework. One word can synthesize what these studies and reports tell us about OPERAS’ field of work: fragmentation. Hence, the OPERAS vision and mission, which arises naturally from this finding: integration.