Transparency to Sustain Open Science Infrastructure

With more than 25 years, the open science movement has led to the creation of many infrastructures that enable researchers to share their data, protocols, software, articles and books. Examples of open science infrastructures include the preprint server ArXiv, the journal software Open Journal System, the data repository software Dataverse and the directories DOAB and DOAJ. These infrastructures have something in common: they do not sell the content they publish. This free sharing statement has led to a common misconception that open science is entirely free: maintaining software and online services comes with significant costs. How do infrastructure get their budget? Mainly, they rely on volunteering funding from research stakeholders. Partly because it's based on volunteer decision, the sustainability of these infrastructure is an important issue. This issue emerged in the 2010s with the report “Putting down roots Securing the future of open access policies” (2016), and the “The 2.5% Commitmen” (Lewis, 2017), calling research libraries to dedicate 2.5% of their total budget to support the open science infrastructure. “Transparency to sustain open science infrastructure” is a project started in 2024 that aims to make funding to open science infrastructure the norm. We have observed that only a few research stakeholders provide financial support, despite the fact this infrastructure benefits both research and society. The publishing platform SciPost, for example, has shown that only 135 institutions have financially contributed, while the publishing services have benefited 12,000 institutions. The goal of the project is to increase the number of funders and to retain them: funding open science should not be an afterthought; the decision of funding these infrastructures should be as evident as it is to buy closed contents for its research community. The goal of the project is aligned to SCOSS, that is, aiming to support research stakeholders in funding open science infrastructure. The project will highlight the contributors to these infrastructures: the more we value those who have funded, the more funders we will have. The project relies on mimicry: when one institution makes this decision, it becomes easier for neighboring institutions to do the same. To enhance the value of volunteer funders, the project has a data-driven approach. It will gather funding data and enrich it with persistent identifiers. The main output will be a web platform that allows everyone to see who has funded what. By displaying this information, we aim to facilitate the decision-making process for funding these infrastructures. For libraries the platform will offer the tool to compare funding strategy, to reason with and persuade colleagues to fund open science infrastructure. The project is funded by the Committee for open science from the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research and manager by Université Grenoble Alpes (France). The partners of the project are DOAB, DOAJ, SciPost, PeerCommunity, OPERAS, SCOSS and Couperin. The web platform will be released during 2025. This poster illustrates the project and explains the data and workflows underlying the platform.