The future of Open Science, though promising, is not certain. Contribute to the sustainability of DOAB, OAPEN, Open Citations and PKP through the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services – SCOSS

The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services – SCOSS led by SPARC Europe, was created in 2017 with the aim to help identify non-commercial services essential to Open Science, and make qualified recommendations on which of these services should be considered for funding support. 

Only non-commercial services on unsound financial footing are eligible.  SCOSS provides the framework and funding structure, vetting potential candidates based on a defined set of criteria. The most eligible of those that pass the vigorous evaluation are then presented to the global OA/OS community of stakeholders with an appeal for monetary support in a crowdfunding-style approach.

SCOSS-supported open science infrastructure provides the scientific and scholarly community with resources and services to access, share, and assess research

In late 2017, SCOSS launched our pilot funding cycle with the presentation of two services for funding: SHERPA/RoMEO (https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo) and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) (https://doaj.org). Since then, 1,691,258 euros have been pledged by more than 200 institutions: 538,359 euros for SHERPA/RoMEO and 1,271,910 for DOAJ.

In 2020 three Open Science infrastructure services have been vetted by SCOSS and selected for our second funding cycle:

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  DOAB and OAPEN serve researchers and readers worldwide by providing easy, free, and central access to tens of thousands of open access books. By collaborating with partners such as SciELO books we strive to improve the visibility of books published by Latin American publishers while demonstrating the global and biblio diverse nature of open access book publishing – with over 30% of the books in DOAB written in a Romance language (https://www.doabooks.org y https://www.oapen.org). To help fund DOAB and OAPEN, contact https://sparceurope.org/download/7929/ .

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  OpenCitations is not-for-profit and open infrastructure that provides unlimited, open and free access to global scholarly bibliographic and citation data, of quality and coverage to rival those from proprietary services, such as Web of Science and Scopus (https://opencitations.net). OpenCitations provides data containing more than 7 hundred million citations that the community can use for any purpose, e.g. in national and international research evaluation exercises to make such activities more transparent and reproducible as compared to other proprietary services. The community is directly involved in the OpenCitations governance through our International Advisory Board, which includes librarians, open science advocates, publishers, researchers and members of other open infrastructures from different countries and institutions. To help fund OpenCitations, contact https://sparceurope.org/download/7913/ .

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  The Public Knowledge Project (PKP) is a non-profit initiative best known for creating and maintaining Open Journal Systems (OJS), the world’s most widely used free and open source software for journal publishing (https://pkp.sfu.ca). Latin America represents some of our highest software usage worldwide, with an estimated 2476 journals in 20 countries actively using OJS in Spanish or Portuguese. Together, with organizations like Redalyc, SciELO, IBICT, and others, we support open access in Latin American by providing the locally-owned, community-led, fully supported, and globally indexed infrastructure that powers your publishing. To help fund the Public Knowledge Project, contact https://sparceurope.org/download/7926/ .
  http://rusbankinfo.ru

By contributing through SCOSS these three services will secure their sustainability, to keep  strengthening the Open Science ecosystem worldwide. Latin America has been referent in Open Access and Open Science with a non-profit, academy-owned approach. These services are helping to build a more robust not-for-profit Open Access landscape worldwide.

To simplify the funding process, and to create a framework that takes into consideration the various economic situations of institutions and bodies throughout the world, SCOSS devised the following flat-fee funding structure:

SCOSS requests that funders commit to a three-year agreement which can be paid up front or annually.

Note: While SCOSS provides a suggested fee and structure, SCOSS-recommended services are happy to work with contributors to tailor a funding agreement.

Well over 200 institutions have contributed to date. Every SCOSS funder that has ever contributed to a SCOSS-endorsed infrastructure is recorded here. Search and sort them by name, country, funding cycle or year their pledge was made.

These services have evolved and demonstrated their vital contribution and we need your help in securing it.

Being that many of these services are now fundamental to implementing Open Access and Open Science policies and supporting these workflows, securing them has become a growing concern of the broader OA and OS community. The formation of the SCOSS represents a community-led effort to help maintain, and ultimately secure, vital infrastructure.

More information https://scoss.org/help-sustain-open-infra/become-a-funder/