The ambitions of OPERAS to provide pan-European infrastructure and services for open access to social science and humanities research requires widespread coordination and support, as well as funding from supporting countries. This can best be achieved by application to the Roadmap of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) which supports the development and implementation of mature pan-European research infrastructures. This study will describe the purpose, origins and development of ESFRI, and will introduce some of the projects and landmarks already on the ESFRI Roadmap that bear similarities with OPERAS. It will also describe the typical lifecycle of an ESFRI project, and the governance and legal structures that have typically been adopted by other ESFRIs, in order to help inform the OPERAS consortium in its application to the ESFRI Roadmap.