Whose infrastructure is it, anyway?

"For most of the past 20+ years, openness was posed as a set of technical problems:

• How do we make research open?
• How do we measure it?
• How do we build the repositories, the platforms and the metadata to hold it all together?
• How do we pay for it?

Some of these we have genuinely settled, and the original question of whether research can be made open at all is no longer seriously in doubt. Others we are visibly still wrestling with. Indeed, a good portion of the OASPA conference programme was given over to experimentation in business models.

But the questions that animated the discussions in Zagreb were different in kind:

• Who owns the infrastructure?
• Who governs it?
• Who is served by the infrastructure? And who is shut out?
• Who does the invisible work of editing, reviewing and maintaining, and who gets recognised for it?
• Who pays, and on whose terms?

Notice that every one of these questions focuses on the balance of ownership, power, participation and recognition."