The good, the bad, and the expensive : Collaborative Knowledge Foundation

"In her Crossref LIVE18 Keynote speech this week, Coko’s Kristen Ratan questioned the sense of the industry’s continuing resignation to being locked in to costly, print-based, outdated workflows and technologies (some of which are now owned by competitor publishers)....

Coko’s solution is a community-owned approach to infrastructure – sharing the development of the baseline infrastructure of our systems through open source technology, and innovating on the surface layer....

Kristen proposed: “We need to rethink our approach to infrastructure.  Right now you share only 10% of your infrastructure with services like Crossref and ORCID. Let’s have 90% of our infrastructure shared and 10% that is custom to your organization. That’s all you need in order to differentiate. With most of the infrastructure that is under the hood being shared and open, you can operate much more efficiently and reinvest those savings in innovation.”  

This approach has been transformative in other industries. Kristen referenced the shared infrastructure in industries such as banking and telecom.  Companies who compete head to head at the level of their branding and services are collaborating to achieve shared infrastructure solutions for the sake of their own and their customers’ efficiency. There are examples in open source as well, with OpenStack having almost the same market penetration as the closed source Amazon Web Services for cloud infrastructure...."