Community funding for Open Science infrastructure: SCOSS 2 years in

With a huge Open Science (OS) policy momentum, libraries are increasingly facilitating access to their institutions’ research outputs. We are becoming more dependent on an infrastructure that supports us in depositing, managing, sharing and publishing our research outputs openly. Without funding, essential services that many are dependent upon are at risk of service degradation, reduced availability and of survival in some cases. As a library community we can help this infrastructure remain in our hands and not for-profit by financially support it through crowd-funding and by helping govern that work.

The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) was established in 2017 to achieve this aim, ultimately to improve the financial position, resilience and sustainability of OS infrastructure services. It has members from most continents, including the Association of African Universities, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, the Council of the Australian University Librarians, EIFL, LIBER, the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation, France, and REDALYC, working with SPARC Europe as the coordinator. SCOSS provides recommendations for funding to those interested in supporting important OS scholarly communications infrastructure, vetted by its members. After a fruitful pilot raising over 2.3 million euros, SCOSS has robust processes and governance in place to continue to recommend important infrastructure for funding in 2020 and beyond. We look forward to discussing how such crowd-funding works, how you might contribute, why, or why not and how the community can have a say in the governance of OS community-funded infrastructure.

This poster will provide an introduction to SCOSS and its purpose and processes. The poster will share insights on the evaluation process, outcomes from the first (pilot) and the second round and will showcase our infrastructures that we recommend the community financially supports.