---
title: "Open Science Infrastructure"
chunk: 7/8
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"
---

=== Type and roles ===
Open Access repositories are the most frequent form of Open Science Infrastructure with 5,791 repositories in existence in December 2021 according to OpenDOAR
Yet, there is a significant diversification of the roles and the activities of open science infrastructure, at least among the largest infrastructures. In the survey of European infrastructure conducted by SPARC Europe, 95% of the respondents mention that they provide services in at least three different stages of research production out of six (Creation, Evaluation, Publishing, Hosting, Discovering and Archiving). Aggregation, hosting and indexing are especially central activities, common to most Open Science Infrastructures regardless of their focus.
Specialization does happen at a higher level. A network analysis identifies "two main clusters of activities":

Publishing-focused infrastructures which are associated with the "publishing and hosting traditional text formats". Among them, "paper submission (41 out of 70) and review (30) were the most commonly reported activities".
Creation-focused infrastructures which deal preferably with the "processing and storing research outputs, particularly data". Theses actors provide specific services in the field of "data gathering (47 out of 71), and data analysis (40)". Besides, "computation and machine learning (18) and Experimentation (15) were roughly half as common".

=== Standards and technologies ===
Standardization is a major function of open science infrastructure as they aim to insure that the content they share and support is distributed consistently as well as ease reuse.
Maintaining open standards is one of the main challenge identified by leading European open infrastructures, as it implies choosing among competing standards in some case, as well as ensuring that the standards are correctly updated and accessibile through APIs or other endpoints. Two third of the respondents have undertaken an evaluation of their technological environment during the past year, to ensure that key components have not become obsolete. As a consequence of this sustained efforts, most open infrastructure complies with the new established standards of open science, such as FAIR data or Plan S.
Open science infrastructures preferably integrate standards from other open science infrastructures. Among European infrastructures: "The most commonly cited systems – and thus essential infrastructure for many – are ORCID, Crossref, DOAJ, BASE, OpenAIRE, Altmetric, and Datacite, most of which are not-for-profit". Google Scholar is the first mentioned commercial service, while Scopus, the leading proprietary academic search engine developed by Elsevier, is one of least quoted leading service. Open science infrastructure are then part of an emerging "truly interoperable Open Science commons" that hold the premise of "researcher-centric, low-cost, innovative, and interoperable tools for research, superior to the present, largely closed system."
Infrastructures are frequently dependent on choices made by external stakeholders, especially scientific publishers: they "do not themselves decide on
the openness of content since they are dependent on the policies of content providers". This affects not only the content but also the "user data policies [that] are set by publishers which limits what can be made available".
Open Science Infrastructure have strong ties with the open source movement. 82% of the European infrastructures surveyed by SPARC claim to have partially built open source software and 53% have their entire technological infrastructure in open source.

=== Governance ===
Governance has been self-identified as a potential weakness by the European infrastructure surveyed by SPARC. Less than half of the respondents considering that they are at a "mature" stage in this regard and a "good governance" is quoted as the main challenge. Interaction between the communities they aim to support and the other stakeholders and funders is especially complicated: "One specific challenge identified was the tension between serving the needs of the community of users versus prioritising the needs of clients that provide financial support to the OSI".
The tension between centralization and diversity largely characterizes Open Science Infrastructure. While historically defined as a "centralized [Open Access] project", Redalyc aims to become a "community-based sustainable infrastructure in Latin America" (Berrecil). The leading European open infrastructures have reported "challenges around ensuring sufficient (and sufficiently diverse) representation" as well as the involvement from some professional communities like researchers and librarians.

=== Audience ===
Open Science Infrastructure "target and serve a wide range of stakeholders". Researchers remain the primary target, but libraries, teachers and learners are among the expected audience of more than half of the infrastructure surveyed by Sparc Europe.
A majority of European infrastructures "operate at a global scale", with English being the primary language of 82% of the respondents. These infrastructures are also frequently multilingual and integrate a specific national focus: they "provide access to a range of language content of local and international significance".

Open Science Infrastructures benefit to diverse disciplines and scientific communities. In 2020, 72% of the European infrastructures surveyed by Sparc Europe claim to support all disciplines. The social sciences and the humanities are the most mentioned disciplines, which is partly attributed to the fact that the survey was "distributed widely by the OPERAS network". In 2010, the infrastructures supporting the social sciences and the humanities were much less prevalent and most of the uses cases came from "biosciences, High Energy Physics and other fields of physics, earth and environmental sciences, computer science, astronomy and astrophysics".