---
title: "Open Science Infrastructure"
chunk: 6/8
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"
---

=== Toward open science infrastructures (2015-…) ===
The consolidation and expansion of commercial scientific infrastructure had entailed renewed calls to secure "community-controlled infrastructure". The acquisition of the open repositories Digital Commons and SSRN by Elsevier has highlighted the lack of reliability of critical scientific infrastructure for open science. The SPARC report on European Infrastructures underlines that "a number of important infrastructures at risk and as a consequence, the products and services that comprise open infrastructure are increasingly being tempted by buyout offers from large commercial enterprises. This threat affects both not-for-profit open infrastructure as well as closed, and is evidenced by the buyout in recent years of commonly relied on tools and platforms such as SSRN, bepress, Mendeley, and Github."
In contrast with the consolidation of privately owned infrastructure, the open science movement "has tended to overlook the importance of social structures and systemic constraints in the design of new forms of knowledge infrastructures". It remained mostly focused to the content of scientific research, with little integration of technical tools and few large community initiatives. "Common pool of resources is not governed or managed by the current scholarly commons initiative. There is no dedicated hard infrastructure and though there may be a nascent community, there is no formal membership."
More precise concepts were needed to embed ethical principles of openness, community-service and autonomous governance in the building of infrastructure and ensure the transformation of small localized scholarly networks into large, "community-wide" structures. In 2013, Cameron Neylon underlined that the lack of common infrastructure was one of the main weakness of the open science ecosystem: "in a world where it can be cheaper to re-do an analysis than to store the data, we need to consider seriously the social, physical, and material infrastructure that might support the sharing of the material outputs of research". Two years later, Neylon, Geoffrey Bilder and Jenifer Lin defined a series of Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructure that reacted primarily to the discrepancy between the increasing openness of scientific publications or datasets and the closeness of the infrastructure that control their circulation.

Over the past decade, we have made real progress to further ensure the availability of data that supports research claims. This work is far from complete. We believe that data about the research process itself deserves exactly the same level of respect and care. The scholarly community does not own or control most of this information. For example, we could have built or taken on the infrastructure to collect bibliographic data and citations but that task was left to private enterprise.
Since 2015 these principles have become the most influential definition of Open Science Infrastructures and been endorsed by leading infrastructures such as Crossref, OpenCitations or Data Dryad and has become a common basis for the institutional evaluation of existing open infrastructures. The main focus of the Principles is to build "trustworthy institutions" with significant commitments in terms of governance, financial sustainability and technical efficiency sot that it can be durably relied on by scientific communities.
By 2021, public services and infrastructures for research have largely endorsed open science as an integral part of their activity and identity: "open science is the dominant discourse to which new online services for research refer." According to the 2021 Roadmap of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI), major legacy infrastructures in Europe have embraced open science principles. "Most of the Research Infrastructures on the ESFRI Roadmap are at the forefront of Open Science movement and make important contributions to the digital transformation by transforming the whole research process according to the Open Science paradigm." Examples of extensive data sharing programs include the European Social Survey (in social science), ECRIN ERIC (for clinical data) or the Cherenkov Telescope Array (in Astronomy).
In agreement with the original intent of the Principles, open science infrastructure are "seen as an antidote to the increased market concentration observed in the scholarly communication space." In November 2021, the UNESCO Recommendation for Open Science acknowledged open science infrastructure as one of the four pillar of open science, along with open science knowledge, open engagement of societal actors and open dialog with other knowledge system and called for sustained investment and funding: "open science infrastructures are often the result of community-building efforts, which are crucial for their longterm sustainability and therefore should be not-for-profit and guarantee permanent and unrestricted access to all public to the largest extent possible."
The development of open scientific infrastructure has become a debated topic regarding the future of online scientific research. In January 2021, a collective of researchers called for a Plan I or Plan Infrastructure in reaction to perceived shortcomings of the international initiative for open science of the cOAlition S, the Plan S. In contrast with the focus of Plan S on scientific publication, Plan I aims to integrate all research outputs on large interoperable infrastructures: "research and scholarship are crucially dependent on an information infrastructure that treats all scholarly output, text, data and code, equally and that is based on open standards and open markets."

== Organization of open infrastructures ==
Most of the landscape reports on Open Infrastructure have been undertaken in Europe and, to a lesser extent, in Latin America. For Europe, the main sources include the SPARC report from 2020, the OPERAS report on social science and humanities infrastructure, as well as the 2019 report of Katherine Skinner (that also extends to a few North American infrastructures). International studies include European Commission 2010 report on The Role of E-Infrastructure which mostly receive input from Europe, South America and North America.
These reports underline that important open science infrastructures may be already existing and yet remain invisible to funders and scientific policies: "alternative practices and projects exist inside and outside Europe, but these projects are almost invisible to the eyes of the public authorities".