---
title: "Open Science Infrastructure"
chunk: 5/8
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Science_Infrastructure"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:49:40.430585+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

The development of the World-Wide Web had rendered numerous pre-existing scientific infrastructure obsolete. It also lifted numerous restrictions and obstacles to online contribution and network management that made it possible to attempt more ambitious project. By the end of the 1990s, the creation of public scientific computing infrastructure became a major policy issue. The first wave of web-based scientific projects in the 1990s and the early 2000s revealed critical issues of sustainability. As funding was allocated on a specific time period, critical databases, online tools or publishing platforms could hardly be maintained; and project managers were faced with a valley of death "between grant funding and ongoing operational funding".
Several competing terms appeared to fill this need. In the United States, the cyber-infrastructure was used in a scientific context by a US National Science Foundation (NSF) blue-ribbon committee in 2003: "The newer term cyberinfrastructure refers to infrastructure based upon distributed computer, information and communication technology. If infrastructure is required for an industrial economy, then we could say that cyberinfrastructure is required for a knowledge economy." E-infrastructure or e-science were used in a similar meaning in the United Kingdom and European countries.
Thanks to "sizable investments", major national and international infrastructures have been incepted from the initial policy discussion in the early 2000s to the economic crisis of 2007–2008, such as the Open Science Grid, BioGRID, the JISC, DARIAH or the Project Bamboo. Specialized free software for scientific publishing like Open Journal Systems became available after 2000. This development entailed a significant expansion of non-commercial open access journals by facilitating the creation and the administration of journal website and the digital conversion of existing journals. Among the non-commercial journals registered to the Directory of Open Access Journals, the number of annual creation has gone from 100 by the end of the 1990s to 800 around 2010, and not evolved significantly since then.
By 2010, infrastructure are "no longer in infancy" and yet "they are also not yet fully mature". While the development of the web solved a large range of technical issues regarding network management, building scientific infrastructure remained challenging. Governance, communication across all involved stakeholders, and strategical divergences were major factors of success or failure. One of the first major infrastructure for the humanities and the social science, the Project Bamboo was ultimately unable to achieve its ambitious aims: "From the early planning workshops to the Mellon Foundation's rejection of the project's final proposal attempt, Bamboo was dogged by its reluctance and/or inability to concretely define itself". This lack of clarity was further aggravated by recurring communication missteps between the project initiators and the community it aimed to serve. "The community had spoken and made it clear that continuing to emphasize Service-oriented architecture would alienate the very members of the community Bamboo was intended to benefit most: the scholars themselves". Budgets cuts following the economic crisis of 2007-2008 underlined the fragility of ambitious infrastructure plans relying on a significant recurring funds.

Leading commercial publishers were initially distanced by the unexpected rise of the Web for academic publication: the executive board of Elsevier "had failed to grasp the significance of electronic publishing altogether, and therefore the deadly danger that it posed—the danger, namely, that scientists would be able to manage without the journal". The persistence of high revenues from subscription and the consolidation of the sector made it possible to fund the conversion of the pre-existing online services to the web as well as the digitization of past collections. By the 2010s, leading publishers have been "moving from a content-provision to a data analytics business" and developed or acquired new key infrastructures for the management scientific and pedagogic activities: "Elsevier has acquired and launched products that extend its influence and its ownership of the infrastructure to all stages of the academic knowledge production process". Since it has expanded beyond publishing, the vertical integration of privately owned infrastructures has become extensively integrated to daily research activities.

The privatised control of scholarly infrastructures is especially noticeable in the context of 'vertical integration' that publishers such as Elsevier and SpringerNature are seeking by controlling all aspects of the research life cycle, from submission to publication and beyond. For example, this vertical integration is represented in a number of Elsevier's business acquisitions, such as Mendeley (a reference manager), SSRN (a pre-print repository) and Bepress (a provider of repository and publishing software for universities).