Building a Sustainable Commons: Why community governance is the bedrock of Open Scholarly Infrastructure - OpenAIRE Blog

"The Open Science movement stands at a critical juncture. While the principle of making research outputs "open" is now widely accepted as a prerequisite for progress, the true challenge remains: achieving long-term sustainability for the core infrastructures that make this openness possible. 

This was the central question explored at the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information's recent Working Group 5 session on Sustaining Infrastructures (full session on Youtube). We are grateful to the Barcelona Declaration team for the invitation and for the opportunity to hear how three major open infrastructure initiatives view the world of sustainability, the challenges, and the opportunities. The OpenAIRE Graph, OpenAlex, and OpenCitations each presented their approaches, offering distinct models for balancing openness with operational viability. (The session presentations are also available on Zenodo.)

The "holy grail" we are all pursuing is the creation of operational models that are not only financially viable but also resilient, trusted by the communities they serve, and fundamentally aligned with scholarly values.

In this landscape, we at OpenAIRE have cultivated a unique, community-centric approach to this challenge. We have deliberately structured ourselves to balance the ideals of open scholarship with the practical realities of operational and financial stability.

This analysis expands on our presentation at the BDORI session and explores how OpenAIRE's federated structure, deep community governance, and hybrid funding model provide a robust blueprint for the future of open scholarly communication. By examining these core components, we can understand how to build a truly sustainable commons."