---
title: "Open Science Infrastructure"
chunk: 4/8
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 Web Revolution (1990–1995) ===
The World Wide Web was originally framed as an open scientific infrastructure. The project was inspired by ENQUIRE, an information management software commissioned to Tim Berners-Lee by the CERN for the specific needs of high energy physics. The structure of ENQUIRE was closer to an internal web of data: it connected "nodes" that "could refer to a person, a software module, etc. and that could be interlined with various relations such as made, include, describes and so forth". While it "facilitated some random linkage between information" Enquire was not able to "facilitate the collaboration that was desired for in the international high-energy physics research community". Like any significant computing scientific infrastructure before the 1990s, the development of ENQUIRE was ultimately impeded by the lack of interoperability and the complexity of managing network communications: "although Enquire provided a way to link documents and databases,  and hypertext provided a common format in which to display them, there was still the problem of getting different computers with different operating systems to communicate with each other".
Sharing of data and data documentation was a major focus in the initial communication of the World Wide Web when the project was first unveiled in August 1991 : "The WWW project was started to allow high energy physicists to share data, news, and documentation. We are very interested in spreading the web to other areas, and having gateway servers for other data".
The web rapidly superseded pre-existing online infrastructure, even when they included more advanced computing features. From 1991 to 1994, users of the Worm Community System, a major biology database on worms, switched to the Web and Gopher. While the Web did not include many advanced functions for data retrieval and collaboration, it was easily accessible. Conversely, the Worm Community System could only be browsed on specific terminals shared across scientific institutions: "To take on board the custom-designed, powerful WCS (with its convenient interface) is to suffer inconvenience at the intersection of work habits, computer use, and lab resources (…) The World-Wide Web, on the other hand, can be accessed from a broad variety of terminals and connections, and Internet computer support is readily available at most academic institutions and through relatively inexpensive commercial services."
The Web and similar protocols developed at the time have had a similar impact on scientific publications. Early forms of open access publishing were not developed by large scale institutional infrastructures but through small initiatives. Universal access, regardless of the operating system, made it possible to maintain and share community-driven electronic journals year before online commercial scientific publishings became viable:

In the late '80s and early '90s, a host of new journal titles launched on listservs and (later) the Web. Journals such as Postmodern Cultures, Surfaces, the Bryn Mawr Classical Review and the Public-Access Computer Systems Review were all managed by scholars and library workers rather than publishing professionals.
The first open-access repositories were individual or community initiatives as well. In August 1991, Paul Ginsparg created the first inception of the arXiv project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in answer to recurring storage issue of academic mailboxes on account of the increasing sharing of scientific articles.

=== Building scientific infrastructures for the web (1995-2015) ===