Good governance: Investigating models in scholarly communication and open research | Invest in Open Infrastructure | 30 August 2022

"As discussed in our literature review on governance in nonprofit organizations, good governance breeds transparency and accountability, and is crucial to any organization looking to build trust with its stakeholders and the communities it serves. While there are some key governance practices for trustworthy, community-centred nonprofits, there is no one right way to structure governance – as the choice of a suitable model depends on a variety of changing internal and external factors. In this second piece, we explore governance in the context of scholarly communication and open research infrastructures in depth. In the face of increasing marketization, acquisitions, and consolidation of academic publishing and knowledge production infrastructure, governance structures that empower a broad and diverse group of community stakeholders to meaningfully impact the strategic planning and management of infrastructure providers are urgently needed to move beyond the parroting of shareholder and market-driven models prevalent in the for-profit industry and realize a true “commoning” of open research infrastructure. With reference to the theoretical literature on governance in scholarly communication and open infrastructure, the piece: illustrates some of the critical considerations that relate to governance in the scholarly communication and open research infrastructure space; proposes a speculative and non-exhaustive framework for a minimum viable system of community governance, offering context for the items suggested; and presents key research questions and recommendations for Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI), funders, and other stakeholders who are looking to support the improvement of governance in this field...."