Invest in Open Infrastructure: A Concept 0.2 | Invest in Open Infrastructure

"We imagine a world in which communities of researchers, scholars, and knowledge workers across the globe are fully enabled to share, discover, and work together. It is clear that the needs of today’s diverse scholarly communities are not being met by the existing largely uncoordinated scholarly infrastructure, which is dominated by vendor products that take ownership of the scholarly process and data. We intend to create a new open infrastructure system that will enable us to work in a more integrated, collaborative and strategic way. It will support global connections and consistency where it is appropriate, and local and contextual requirements where that is needed....

It is clear that the needs of today’s diverse scholarly communities are not being met by the existing scholarly infrastructure, which is dominated by vendor products that take ownership of the scholarly process and data as well as by North Atlantic dominance and digital colonialism. The goals of these vendors is largely to generate profit, which stands in stark contrast to the values of mission-driven educational and research organisations where innovation and open access are central. These products favor vendor lock-in and monopoly models by nature, despite a clear incompatibility with the scholarly values of our communities. The dependence of research and scholarship on digital infrastructure has grown. In the scholarly community, there is a new awareness of the opportunities of open infrastructure (including governance for user communities and contextual relevance alongside the retention of resources within scholarly communities) and new engagement as well as a sense of urgency to work together to support stable, sustainable, interoperable and open infrastructure....

The Framework will serve a number of essential functions for stakeholders concerned with the maintenance and development of this infrastructure:

1. Research and Reporting: tracking projects, infrastructure services, existing mechanisms for community supported infrastructure, funding data and funder needs; and exchanging knowledge on this research on open infrastructure.
2. Definition: establishing criteria for OI, defining the workflow of scholarly communication, and identifying areas of redundancy and gaps.
3. Collaboration: building agreement among stakeholders, creating a healthy, competitive environment where end-to-end solutions that meet stakeholder needs and meet OI criteria can be identified and packaged.
4. Advocacy and Engagement: communicating principles, priorities, good practices and practical tools.
5. Matching and Assessment: Develop and maintain a methodology for matching what is needed to what is available, prioritizing collaborative solutions. The framework would help to identify areas for investment in the connections between projects that will create more fully adoptable solutions, and promote investment therein....

Our Definition of Open Infrastructure for Scholarly Communications

• By “Infrastructure” we mean the sets of services, protocols, standards and software that the academic ecosystem needs in order to perform its functions throughout the research lifecycle – from the earliest phases of research, collaboration and experimentation through data collection and storage, data organization, data analysis and computation, authorship, submission, review and annotation, copyediting, publishing, archiving, citation, discovery and more.
• Open infrastructure is the narrower sets of services, protocols, standards and software that can empower communities to collectively build the systems and infrastructures that deliver new improved collective benefits without restrictions, and for a healthy global interrelated infrastructure system...."