Resetting and Recharging Research Communications in the Sun of Los Angeles: A FORCE11 Conference Report - The Scholarly Kitchen

"Leslie McIntosh and Danny Kingsley in their opening keynote of the conference focused on this important question: what are the differences between “Open Scholarly Infrastructure” and “Open Scholarly Infrastructure” as the emphasis is important as they distinguished it. In their framing, there have been a number of initiatives to support the creation, distribution and discovery of open scholarly content. But over time, it became obvious that these open platforms were not “Open” in the sense that they were private companies that could be bought, sold, or managed to suit the interests of other stakeholders than necessarily the community. Many platforms for open scholarship are run by companies, whose mission may or may not align with principles of “Open Infrastructure” Kingsley and McIntosh argued. 

They noted that words such as “sustainability”, “trust”, and “risk” are being featured in marketing language associated with scholarly infrastructure services provided by corporate entities. Kingsley argued that this framing implies that corporate solutions and services are more reliable in that they are inherently more sustainable, and therefore more trustworthy, which she questioned. She continued by reinforcing that this inference implies that those open services not backed by the investments possible from corporate support are therefore less so. In her view, this misses some of the key values associated with open infrastructure, including community governance and control, the ability to adjust and transform the services in a way that meets community needs (as opposed to corporate goals), as well as portability...."