Assessing data infrastructure: the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure – Lost Boy

A range of organisations have adopted the principles, most recently Europe PMC.

No organisation meets all of the principles.

But the intention isn’t that an organisation should comply with all of them before doing an assessment. An assessment is intended to prompt reflection and development of a plan for improvement.

There is an assumption that organisations will regularly reassess themselves against the principles.

All of the existing assessments have taken the same broad approach, replicating that used by CrossRef:

• a public statement that the organisation has decided to adopt the principles
• a high-level self-assessment against the principles, using a Red/Amber/Green (RAG) rating for each item on the list
• for each principle, a more detailed discussion of how the organisation has implemented that principle or has plans to do so
• links to relevant evidence, e.g. public policies or governance documents that back up the assessment

I’ve produced a public spreadsheet listing the current RAG ratings for each organisation.

To help with future assessments, I think there’s scope to:

• produce a common openly licensed template that can be used to publish the self-assessment ratings and capture relevant links
• some additional guidance about how to assess and interpret each principles
• suggestions for the types of evidence that could be referenced, or published to help to make the assessments verifiable