Rules vs. Principles in POSI | Martin Paul Eve

In recent days, several signatories to the Principles on Open Scholarly Infrastructure have taken to performing self-audits of their compliance with the principles. Of course, holding oneself to account in this way is a welcome development. Without some form of self-appraisal it is not possible to know how close one is to fulfilling the goals of POSI.

However, I wanted to gesture, in this post, towards a distinction between “rules” and “principles” that I believe are fundamental to the systems that POSI wishes to implement. People have begun treating the example specifications in POSI as though they were hard-and-fast rules. For example, the wind-down contingency clause specifies “12 months” – and people can become very anxious about strictly fulfilling this criterion.

But the truth is, taking this example, that some infrastructures will need a year to wind down, while others will only require 6 months. The principles actually go on to state: “12 months in most cases”. But some might even take longer than a year. This wind-down period is not just about closing down the organisation, but is also concerned with giving the community that uses the infrastructure enough time to migrate. The point is that the principle here is: you build and set aside sufficient contingency funding to ensure an orderly wind-down. However, some people are treating this as though it were a rule with a hard and fast metric of “1 year”.

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