New SPARC Europe report out: Scoping the Open Science Infrastructure Landscape in Europe – SPARC Europe

“Service providers could benefit from:

 

Sharing lessons learnt. This might involve developing communities of practice and guidance; pooling resources and working with initiatives such as Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) and JROST. 
Following good governance practices. This allows the community to trust that the infrastructure or service will be steered by the needs of the community and stay true to the values of research.
Going open source and adopting open standards.  “Despite a strong uptake of open source and open standards by many, challenges remain for some in sharing good governance, open content and applying open standards,” wrote the authors.
Diversifying fund-raising efforts, upskilling to embrace a range of business revenue models. This allows the organisation to spread financial risk….”

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

“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….”

Joint Roadmap for Open Science Tools

“We propose an effort to develop a “Joint Roadmap for Open Science Tools”. This will be delivered by an informal group of like-minded organizations coming together around a common purpose.

Our objectives will be to deliver:

  • A vision for the toolchain or dashboard of the researcher of the future
  • A mission for what we hope to achieve and how we can work together
  • A set of user stories that together describe the problems we want to solve
  • A preliminary roadmap for how the known existing projects can come together
  • Next steps

Why

There is a growing category of open science technologies and services stewarded by non-profit organizations that are targeting the key needs and requirements of scholarly production, publishing, dissemination and collaboration. However, to date, the major projects in this category have not made a unified effort to come together, compare notes, and identify areas of cooperation and integration. As leaders of these projects ourselves, we are aware there are obvious synergies that are not being pursued, and likely many others still waiting to be discovered. Moreover, there is no holistic vision or overall game plan about what the researcher experience of the future should or could be that these projects can support….

We are focusing on open tools and services delivered by non-profit organizations because we know from our own experience that there is a shared sense of mission and a willingness to collaborate openly between these teams that are often lacking in their for-profit counterparts. These groups are actively building and delivering solutions, and thus have product roadmaps that they can speak authoritatively to. It is also critical that researchers participate because their needs and perspective drives the demand for what we’re doing, and thus our goals….”