Open Scholarly Infrastructure: Transformation in a Shifting Landscape

The dblp computer science bibliography celebrated its 32nd anniversary with a celebratory colloquium on Friday, September 19th, 2025, 4pm at the University of Trier, Campus II, K101 ("Kapelle"). The event served as a venue for honoring Dr. Michael Ley's 32 years of dedication to the dblp database throughout his professional career. This is a keynote given by Prof. Dr. Carole Goble (University of Manchester, UK)) following a week at the Dagsthul Seminar https://www.dagstuhl.de/en/seminars/seminar-calendar/seminar-details/25381 Open Scholarly Information Systems: Status Quo, Challenges, Opportunities ( Sep 14 – Sep 19, 2025 ). The talk ended up being a summary of the week long discussions. Abstract: Over the past two decades, the scholarly communication ecosystem has undergone a profound transformation, driven by the growth of open science, digital research infrastructures, and global mandates prioritizing FAIR transparency, accessibility, and reuse of research outputs. Transformation both causes shifts in the landscape (fragmentation across systems, proprietary lock-ins, inequities in participation) and is a response to them (a future of AI enabled scholarship). Transformation always meets resistance: from community normative practices to the rise of national data sovereignty. What role will long-standing initiatives like DBLP play in a future dominated by machine-actionable metadata, decentralized architectures, and AI-driven discovery? How can we design infrastructures that are as open and participatory as the scholarship they aim to support?