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Community Funding for Open Science Infrastructure: SCOSS 2 years in
Tom Mosterd (DOAB / OAPEN, Niederlande), Giannis Tsakonas (Library and Information Center University of Patras, Griechenland)
DOI

Abstract

Germany, Austria, Switzerland and rest of Europe libraries have shown unprecedented commitment to facilitating open access to their institutions’ research outputs. The large scale transition to Open Access is accompanied by increasing policy commitments to Open Science (OS) across Europe. Moving towards ‘open’ means we are becoming more dependent on infrastructures that support us in depositing, managing, sharing and publishing research outputs openly. Much of the scholarly communications infrastructure run by not for-profits is free to libraries, which helps limit library costs for Open Science. However, this infrastructure has maintenance and development costs to contend with. Without funding, essential services that many are dependent upon are at risk; at risk of service degradation, reduced availability and of survival in some cases. This is infrastructure that we cannot do without. The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) was established in 2017 to achieve this aim, ultimately to improve the financial position, resilience and sustainability of OS infrastructure services. SCOSS has helped raise 2.3 million Euros so far with France recently committing to this cause with almost 0.5 million. Pledges have come from most continents. Members include the Association of African Universities, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, the Council of Australian University Librarians, EIFL, LIBER, the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, France and REDALYC, with SPARC Europe as the coordinator. SCOSS provides recommendations for funding to those interested in supporting important OS scholarly communications infrastructure, vetted by its members using robust evaluation processes. After a fruitful pilot SCOSS has received financial support from over 200 university libraries across the globe for SherpaRoMEO and DOAJ. We now look forward to presenting four new infrastructures for funding by the community that includes DOAB, OAPEN, the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) and Open Citations.

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