Making the Global Open Research Commons Truly Global: A report from the Lorentz Workshop, July 21-25 2025

This report describes the conduct and outcomes of a Lorentz workshop held on July 21-25 2025. The workshop was organised by a subset of the chairs of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) Global Open Research Commons (GORC) Interest Group and International Implementations Working Group, augmented and reinforced by staff from SURF. It was held as a Lorentz Centre workshop to embracer the advantages of this specific location for an in-depth and broad ranging collaborative exploration of a range of issues. The specific setting of a Lorentz Workshop gave space and time to re-inspect past debates, and to share experiences to implement the model in practice. The workshop discussed a wide range of issues, which are documented in this report and its appendices.

The overwhelming message from those who attended the workshop is that the GORC International Model is well-constructed, useful and being used. The structure of the model draws on existing good practice as well as fundamental information science principles, and has been carefully refined through community review. The model is applicable to a wide range of settings. While it might need further fine-tuning as with any model, it is already an excellent epistemic framework to enable individuals and organisations to reflect theoretically and practically about their activities and needs in the realm of digital research infrastructure. And, the model is being used in practice for a variety of purposes, including interoperability between commons and internally within organisations. It is already having an impact by shaping national and pan-national digital research infrastructures.