Transparency to sustain open science infrastructure 2025-02-03

Sections ● On sustainability ● How can TSOSI contribute to sustainability? ● How can we attract more funders? ● A centralised tool to highlight funders

Project factsheet Leader Partners Funder

On Sustainability

The Open science movement works with infrastructures that are consistent with its values: the content they publish is not commercialized, and, moreover, reuse is encouraged.

In the 15 years since the beginning of Open science, researchers have changed their practises; and institutions have designed new policies in favour of open science. Open science infrastructures are widely used! But their economic health is fragile...

An asymmetry between numbers of users and funders DOAJ in 2014-2015 as example Johnson, R., & Fosci, M. (2016). Putting down roots: Securing the future of open-access policies. Knowledge Exchange. link

SCOSS, 2017. An initiative to provide financial support for essential open infrastructures and build capacity across (them?)

The ‘SCOSS family’ Each year, SCOSS identifies two to four open infrastructures and invites all research stakeholders to contribute to their funding scoss.org, 2025-01

Research libraries are important stakeholders If we don’t collectively invest in the infrastructure we need for the open scholarly commons, it will not get built or it will only be haphazardly half built Lewis, D. W. (2017). The 2.5% Commitment. https://hdl.handle.net/1805/14063 In 2017, the "2.5% commitment" calls every library to commit 2.5% of their total budget to the open science infrastructure.

2020, beyond libraries: calling every stakeholder to fund open science infrastructure Funding agencies, governments, institutions, charities and other funders must strategise on how to effectively fund this rich and important landscape more structurally. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4159838 2020

Governments, funders and relevant institutions are encouraged to integrate open science principles into existing funding mechanisms 2021, a worldwide call by UNESCO UNESCO Open Science toolkit: Funding Open Science https://doi.org/10.54677/MGVX2222 2021

Despite these efforts, there is still room for progress This success is however not reflected in our fundraising; we can no longer sustain our services without significantly increased community support (2024-10) Caux, J.-S. (2024-10). Diamond sustainability requires sustenance, link - diamond publisher in the physical science - started in 2016 - nearly 3,000 articles published - involving ~7,000 authors associated to ~1,200 organisations - how many of these organisations financially contributed?

TSOSI aims to improve the sustainability of open science infrastructure

How can TSOSI contribute to sustainability?

Open science infrastructures do not sell content: they rely mainly on voluntary financial support. A good comparison is Wikipedia: access and content is free to use, and every year they make a call for funding around December.

For centuries, research performing organisations have been used to buy content for their communities. Open science infrastructures are recent, and so are the reasons why we need to contribute financially to them.

Why should you, as a budget manager, buy content and services? 62% of researchers use this content The commercial provider gives you a discount for the next 3 years The supplier has improved the amount of content available It has been one of your key resources for decades. Cancelling it would generate problems

Why should you, as a budget manager, support an open infrastructure? 90% of researchers use this infrastructure The infrastructure is governed by researchers, so it will remain open In regards to long term-services and budget restrictions, it’s the most pertinent choice Our library catalogue relies on the metadata from this infrastructure This infrastructure is helping to make open science a reality

why We know much more about why we should purchase content than why we should fund open science infrastructure

Supporting open infrastructures should be as obvious as buying content and services. TSOSI aims to disseminate, as widely as possible, the reasons why we need to support open infrastructures.

How can we attract more funders?

When an organization buys any content for their community, it generates news, an update on the website, and send emails to internal lists. What happens after financially supporting an open science infrastructure? A non-existent APC isn't quite as noticeable as one you have to pay SciPost, ibid.

The more we highlight those who have funded, the more funders we will attract

TSOSI will spotlight the stakeholders that have contributed to these infrastructures There is no reason to silence a financial transaction carried out for the common good.

A centralised tool to highlight funders

TSOSI is a web platform that centrally collects data describing financial support made to open infrastructures 1 Infrastructures send us the data they have that describes all the funding they have received. Essentially it’s a spreadsheet where one line describes a transaction, like: organisation name, date, amount

2 TSOSI enriches this data with persistent identifiers (ROR, Wikidata), plus logos and Wikipedia abstracts, thanks to these identifiers 3 TSOSI puts together all these data; structures them and deduplicates them 4 TSOSI builds a web platform to make the data discoverable to everyone.

doabooks.org InfraFinder Date Funder Amount € 2023-01-12 University of Delhi 1000 2023-01-02 University of California San Diego 12000 2022-12-24 University of Belgrade 500 2022-12-24 Monash University 8000 2022-12-19 Université Paris Cité 7000 United Kingdom since 2003 POSI SCOSS selected The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a website that hosts a community-curated list of open access journals, maintained by Infrastructure Services for Open Access (IS4OA). It was launched in 2003 with 300 open access journals. Derived from Wikipedia licensed CC-BY-SA. Switch to graphs Pivot page 1: infrastructure DATA IS FICTITIOUS

2020 Total (EUR) Year 100 000 200 000 300 000 America Europe Africa Asia Unknown 2021 2022 2023 2024 The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a website that hosts a community-curated list of open access journals, maintained by Infrastructure Services for Open Access (IS4OA). It was launched in 2003 with 300 open access journals. Derived from Wikipedia licensed CC-BY-SA. Switch to table Total funding by year grouped by continents Pivot page 1: infrastructure DATA IS FICTITIOUS

Date Infrastructure* Amount € 2023-02-12 PCI 2500 2022-12-09 SciPost 3000 2022-08-07 DOAB 7000 2022-08-01 DOAJ 3000 2022-07-20 PCI 1000 * Only the data from the partner’s project is taken into account; see FAQ univ-grenoble-alpes.fr The Université Grenoble Alpes is a public research university and a grand établissement in Grenoble, France. Founded in 1339, it is the third largest university in France with about 60,000 students and over 3,000 researchers. Derived from Wikipedia licensed CC-BY-SA. France since 2019 Pivot page 2: funder DATA IS FICTITIOUS

Where to collect financial data? For the launch of the project (2025), the data comes from the project partners:

Do you represent an open science? join us! tsosi.org/contact

In the coming years, we also need to collectively find a way to obtain data from library consortia and institutions Where to collect financial data? OpenCost can be used by institutions to declare funding for open science infrastructures. The other logos are from library consortia around the world

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