Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) Releases Preliminary Findings of Investigation Into Defining Open Scholarly Infrastructure

From Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI):

Today, we share the preliminary findings from our investigation into defining open scholarly infrastructure. This investigation is a step towards building a shared vision for what an ecosystem of open systems and services looks like that supports research and scholarly communication. We invite you to comment on the report, by 3 May 2022.

For this report, we examined a body of literature that includes works across the fields of anthropology, scholarly communications, international development studies, science and technology studies, and infrastructure studies. In particular, we paid close attention to how other efforts, including the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), Educopia Institute, the 2.5% Commitment initiative, the Scholarly Communication Technology Catalogue (SComCaT), the UNESCO Recommendations on Open Science and the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS), have defined “scholarly infrastructure’ and “open scholarly infrastructure”.

We synthesised the characteristics and dimensions defined in the literature we reviewed — paying particular attention to overarching themes and points of contention.

Our main takeaways:

1. Infrastructure serves a function.
2. Infrastructure is a socio-technical system rather than a technical product.
3. Infrastructure is dynamic.
4. Infrastructure operates at different scales, both temporally and spatially.
5. Infrastructure is not neutral.

From this synthesis, we identified practical considerations IOI should make when conducting its investigations into open infrastructure for research and scholarship.

shared vision for what an ecosystem of open systems and services looks like that supports research and scholarly communication. We invite you to comment on the report, by 3 May 2022.

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