Transparency to Sustain Open Science Infrastructure
“Transparency to Sustain Open Science Infrastructure” is a new project to be carried out by Université Grenoble Alpes, and implemented by the GRICAD unit.
The project is dedicated to the sustainability of Open science infrastructure (e.g. DOAJ, DOAB, OpenCitation, SoftwareHeritage, Dataverse and many more).
The starting point of the project is an awareness on the economic fragility of open science (OS) infrastructure. One specificity of the infrastructure is that they are recent (less than 30 years) and most importantly that they are not based on selling services: they contribute to the realization of science as a common good. Despite their central role in the research ecosystem, the funding model for these infrastructure has not yet been stabilized. See for example the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (2017) initiative or the recent toolkit Funding Open Science (2022) from the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science.
The aim of the project is to increase the funding made to open science infrastructure. How can we achieved this ? We find by our experience that it is not easy to get people to pay for something that they can have for free. For example, if you are a budget manager, why should you spend 10k€ for, let’s say, the Public Knowledge Project [1], rather than a service that give you access to private content for all your colleagues? To make the former choice more common, the project will make the funding transaction made in favor of open science infrastructure publicly available.
The main project deliverable is a web platform, where one can explore the funding made between research actors and OS infrastructure. For the launch year, only the project's partner infrastructures will be included. The platform will give greater visibility and value to the players that fund OS infrastructure, so that it will be “as easy to spend money for commercial services as to fund OS infrastructure working for the common good of science”.
Project fact sheet
Institution leader: Université Grenoble Alpes
Partners: SCOSS, DOAJ, DOAB, PeerCommunityIn, SciPost, OPERAS
Funder: French Committee for Open Science
budget: 76k€
Institution leader: Université Grenoble Alpes
Partners: SCOSS, DOAJ, DOAB, PeerCommunityIn, SciPost, OPERAS
Funder: French Committee for Open Science
budget: 76k€
[1] The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is a not-for-profit initiative focusing on open access and open science. It produces open source software such as Open Journal System for scientific publishing. At Université Grenoble Alpes it is used by the Centre Mersenne for the reviewing processs.
6 May 2024
