The open scholarship ecosystem faces collapse; it's also our best hope for a more resilient future | Impact of Social Sciences

"The COVID-19 pandemic is significantly impacting universities and higher education institutions, reducing budgets and presenting new design challenges that will fundamentally alter how research and scholarship operate. Economic volatility is also constraining support for key systems and services that the academy relies on, especially those that are community-led. Kaitlin Thaney argues that there’s a need to converge on community-controlled open scholarship projects, to both meet the demands of the moment, and build a more resilient system for scholarly communication for future crisis situations, and invites readers to participate in planning how such systems can be maintained....

• Openness is going to be more radically accepted (even demanded) than ever before post-crisis.

• Many key pieces of scholarly research landscape are at risk of going out of business or consolidating by the end of the year. Looking ahead 12-18 months, there is a real threat of infrastructure collapse, the severity and downstream effects of which are not yet fully known at this time.

• The current state of funding and resourcing will force institutions to do more with less and to think beyond their walls about shared models of financing...."