Crossref Research and Development: Releasing our Tools from the Ground Up - Crossref

"Why is this important? As many readers doubtless know, Crossref is committed to The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure. For reasons of insurance, everything we do and newly develop is open source and we want our members to be able to re-use the software that we create. It’s also important because, if we centralize these low-level building blocks, we make it much easier to fix bugs when they occur, which would otherwise be distributed across all of our projects. As a result, Crossref Labs has a series of small code libraries that we have released for various service interactions. We often find ourselves needing to interact with AWS services. Indeed, Crossref’s live systems are in the process of transitioning to running in the cloud, rather than our own data centre. It makes sense, therefore, for prototype Labs systems to run on this infrastructure, too. However, the boto3 library is not terribly Pythonic. As a result, many of our low-level tools interact with AWS. These include: ... I should also say that our openness is more than unidirectional. While we are putting a lot of effort into ensuring that everything new we put out is openly accessible, we are also open to contributions coming in. If we’ve built something and you make changes or improve it, please do get in touch or submit a pull request. Openness has to work both ways if projects are truly to be used by the community...."