Over the past year through the Future of Open Scholarship project, we have worked with institutional decision makers, infrastructure providers, and funding bodies to better understand key decision points, costs, and funding models to maintain, sustain, and scale open infrastructure projects. Today we are proud to share the outputs of that work.

The full report, “Designing a Preparedness Model for the Future of Open Scholarship”, can be found here. Additional resources and briefs created for this project include:

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Key Findings & Recommendations

The findings highlighted below are about choice and tensions, product and people, and costs and benefits. They also demonstrate the ways in which the structuring of the current system has impeded responsiveness to current events.

They include:

  • A call for aligning our existing systems by examining the challenges in “local first” development, customisation, the relationship of “build vs. buy” decisions to time and resourcing, effects on staffing and maintenance, and interoperability of shared systems.
  • Aligning power and influence to enact change by recognizing the power and opportunity for collectives to drive change — from accountability and vendor reciprocity to increased investment by consortia and existing funding programs through coordination.
  • Rethinking funding mechanisms by exploring  the tenets underlying collective investment models — examining existing funding mechanisms and unpacking where additional needs lie.

We recommend a series of practical interventions to address the social, technical, and financial challenges that have surfaced over the course of this work.

These recommendations include:

  • Building for increased modularity and compatibility of common infrastructures;
  • Designing shared service and support models to drive resources and staffing support;
  • And, establishing an Open Infrastructure Technology Oversight Committee, providing a foundation for sharing best practices, aligning power, and calling for broader system change including negotiating with vendors on pricing, reciprocity, and values-alignment.

Learn More, Read the Complete IOI Blog Post

Direct to Full Text Report: “Designing a Preparedness Model for the Future of Open Scholarship”