Category Archives: oa.ioi

Modeling the Future for Open Scholarship – Call for interviews – Google Docs

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“Universities and colleges leaders have an opportunity — and an obligation — to build a plan today that addresses strains on existing infrastructure and also looks to the future needs to support its students, researchers, and faculty. That calls for thinking through what a “preparedness” model looks like for higher education and research writ large, one that takes into account the economic implications on the university itself as well as on the services and enterprises it relies on, like publishing and data management infrastructures. …

We propose the creation of a coordinated, cross-institutional “preparedness plan”, in partnership with Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI), to begin work on identifying the opportunities, leverage points, costs and approaches that could be employed to enable the following: 

Creation of shared set of principles to help assess solutions based on a values-based framework;

Support that addresses heightened demands on universities as they shift operations online and transform the way they serve their communities;

Coordinated scenario planning that plans for a radical shift towards open scholarship and a convergence on existing, open tools and services;

Ways to pool resources and risk to maximize cost-effectiveness and minimize system failure; 

Creation of a shared action plan to facilitate coordinated decision-making ensuring research continuity;

Bolster researcher productivity, continuity, and growth in both the near and long-term. …

 

Call for University Participation. We are currently seeking university representatives to join us as key participants in this work. Representatives should be able to provide information about the realities abilities at their university, and could consist of roles including, but not limited to university librarians, program directors, technology leads, Vice Provosts, and Deans. Participants will need to be able to speak to budget and programmatic decisions within their department and be able to provide insight to other changes at their Institution.”

Open Infrastructure in times of crisis: How IOI can help | Invest in Open Infrastructure

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“This past month, we’ve seen a whole new set of challenges present themselves for the research ecosystem in the face of a global pandemic. Universities across the board are closing the doors and rapidly assessing what they can move online. Libraries are grappling with closures, and increased demand for remote access to their collections. 

Funding models that have long propped up higher education, research, and scholarly communications are in flux due to volatility of the markets, budgeting uncertainty at the university level in preparation for what’s to come, and those with means are scrambling to make emergency grants to the most shovel-ready projects and affected communities. The global economy is coming to a grinding halt.

Meanwhile, the research community is in overdrive, working on measures to triage and overcome the biggest public health crisis in our lifetime.  

The time for a convergence on open infrastructure is now. We are seeing radical calls for openness and collaboration (1, 2, 3 …) as a means of survival and necessity in the fight against COVID-19; advancing the state of research is now seen as essential in the fight for humanity. …”

Invest in Open Infrastructure Welcomes Kaitlin Thaney as Executive Director | Invest in Open Infrastructure

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“Invest in Open Infrastructure is excited to announce the appointment of Kaitlin Thaney as the program’s inaugural Executive Director. Thaney has over 15 years experience in the open research and technology space where she’s built and scaled infrastructure, programming, and long-term funding for organizations including Creative Commons, Digital Science, Mozilla and, most recently, the Wikimedia Foundation.

Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) is a not-for-profit project designed to foster a shared, interoperable, and community-driven network of open infrastructure to advance research. The project aims to serve as a trusted ally and resource for a global coalition of projects, organizations, and funders in the open research space, together working to build a sustainable future for open scholarly infrastructure….”

Co-creating Open Infrastructure to Support Diversity and Equity

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“To reframe our priorities in this way requires collective will and coordination across regions and institutions to build new kinds of support for resource reallocation. It further requires institutional courage and political will to declare that open, autonomous, and equitable systems are preferred over “prestigious” Euro-centric research systems that continue to undermine other epistemic communities from around the world. It requires that disciplines and societies prioritize who they have been centering in their research, whose voices they’ve been amplifying, and whose they have been silencing. Supporting the status quo while leaving initiatives that reflect epistemic diversity and knowledge equity as second-tier priorities will result in continued entrenchment of status quo inequities and the marginalization of truly innovative, equitable systems….”

IOI Position Description Director | Invest in Open Infrastructure

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“Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) is a coalition of organizations working to organize and deliver funding for open scholarly infrastructure at scale from the most obvious beneficiaries: the global institutions and agencies that form the bulk of academic support and funding today. This role will be responsible for coordinating the day-to-day activities of IOI, working with the Steering Committee to define and execute a plan to unlock substantial and durable funding for open scholarly infrastructure. This involves managing the program work, staff, and fundraising as needed for programmatic activities, developing and engaging with the IOI Steering Committee and the partner organizations.

We are looking for someone with an entrepreneurial spirit to work with the IOI Steering Committee to develop and launch new initiatives aimed at expanding support for open scholarly infrastructure. This role will engage in everything from strategic planning and communications, cross-org collaboration, day-to-day tasks, hiring processes, fundraising, and overall program design and management.

This role is responsible for managing the IOI project, a fiscally sponsored project of Code for Science & Society (CS&S). The role reports to the IOI Advisory Committee, part of the larger IOI Steering Committee.”

Beyond Innovation: Emerging Meta-Frameworks for Maintaining an Open Scholarly Infrastructure | Ithaka S+R

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“There are numerous free and community-based academic and cultural resources that are designed and built on open source or open access principles. Undertaken by not-for-profit mission-driven organizations, such services and technologies aim to introduce innovation to various stages of scholarly communication from designing research projects to publishing results.  Today, amid growing concerns about their long-term durability and agility, there is renewed interest in sustainability, business models, revenue, and maintenance. In our previous post, we looked back at some of the recommendations that resulted from research on sustainability that Ithaka S+R conducted more than a decade ago and highlighted some recent studies that assess the condition and prospects of academy-driven initiatives offered in the digital scholarship space. In today’s blog, we’ll look into the nascent organizations that are forming to provide a meta-framework to a range of independent but like-minded initiatives by fostering networking, raising awareness, and advocating best practices for an enduring and effective service infrastructure.

Such meta-frameworks aim to foster networking, promote interoperability, advance best practices, and raise awareness about business models among different stakeholders to ensure an enduring and effective service infrastructure. Based on what’s available on their websites, the table below provides examples of such meta-frameworks that were formed to coordinate, align, and promote open services, technologies, and standards….”

Ten Prerequisites to Securely Fund Open Infrastructure

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“The scholarly communication community needs to call for an open, sustainable infrastructure that is community-owned — one that speaks to our open and academic values. It must be open; not closed off by vendors creating a situation where the academy becomes dependent on a suite of products that are likewise dependent on essential infrastructure, often built by the academy in the first place. For this to truly work and to offer a viable and sustainable solution, we need to develop an interconnected rich and diverse ecosystem of open infrastructure where many flowers bloom upon which a plethora of for- and not-for-profit services can be built.

Imagine a future ten years from now where Open is the default, enabled by an open scholarly infrastructure that follows principles of Open as published by Cameron Neylon et al in 2015 or by COAR and SPARC in 2019. A world where the community is involved in the good governance of infrastructure, where services and infrastructure follow open standards such as open APIs and open source; where content, metadata and usage stats are made openly available, and where we have transparent pricing and contracts. Open Infrastructure is motivated by a drive for research excellence and open values rather than profit-making. This happens when communities of stakeholders fund and sustain this infrastructure, including the academy as a whole and its libraries, government, funders, learned societies, publishers, service providers and individuals. When institutions provide operational funding, this support extends beyond financing innovation, acknowledging successful projects that have continued to provide value to their communities over the years and rewarding them with funding for operational costs. Valued, tried and tested infrastructures that need a financial boost to bring them onto a more healthy footing have also been enabled through initiatives like SCOSS. This involves a new strategic vision of what needs to be funded and how it will be enabled by initiatives like Invest in Open Infrastructure, with new kinds of business models for the mid- to longer term. This will form the basis for a new, transparent, trustworthy and equitable scholarly communication society….”

Schmidt Futures Supports Invest in Open Infrastructure | Invest in Open Infrastructure

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“We are thrilled to announce that Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) has been generously supported with an award of 150k USD from Schmidt Futures, a philanthropic initiative founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt. IOI is an effort to enable durable, scalable, and long lasting open scientific and scholarly infrastructure to emerge, thrive, and deliver its benefits on a global scale. We are a global coalition of projects, organizations, and initiatives actively working to build a sustainable future for open scholarly infrastructure….

With this initial support, we will be opening the search for a Director in the next few weeks. This will be a full time, remote-friendly position offered in partnership with IOI’s fiscal sponsor Code for Science & Society. Stay tuned for more details on this opportunity, and visit investinopen.org to show your support and get the latest news….”

 

ACRL/SPARC Forum: Collective Reinvestment in Open Infrastructure (ACRL)

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“Libraries are increasingly considering scaling back their subscriptions or cancelling big deals altogether. Yet, the question of how and where to reinvest the resources that become available is both far from settled and increasingly pressing. As we start to move away from the subscription model, we should be intentional about crafting the vision for open research communication we strive to build and how we intend to build it. 

This forum, “If I Had A Million Dollars: Collective Reinvestment in Open Infrastructure,” will invite active participation throughout the session in a facilitated discussion with experts representing both libraries and research funders. …”