Dear colleagues,
 
No doubt you’ve seen the announcement that JROST is back next week and SPARC Europe is helping organise 2 sessions that might be of interest to you:
 
Sustaining Open through Collective Action. At 4.10pm CET, Wed, 16 Dec 2020. With Kevin Stranack (PKP), Silvio Peroni (Open Citations) and Eelco Ferwerda (DOAB/OAPEN)

Abstract:             
Building and sustaining the promise of open science requires solid infrastructures. Open science, open source, open access, open licensing, and open tools are all community endeavours, distinct from traditional commercial activities. However, all of this community activity and its desired impact does not happen on its own. It requires planning, organization, communication, outreach, and skilled professionals. These infrastructures must create fully-functional, competitive applications, but cannot rely on commercial paths to sustainability, such as restricting access to paying customers. As a result, they must develop new models of funding. In this session, we will discuss the SCOSS model of collaborative fundraising, and hear from the three current projects: OAPEN/DOAB, OpenCitations, and the Public Knowledge Project, and how they are working together to finance their projects and building a new path towards open science sustainability. Panelists will also pose questions to the audience, to discover what they value about open infrastructure, to learn what they see as risks or concerns, and to discuss their vision of a sustainable, open future.
 
How Open is Open? At 5pm CET, Wed, 16 Dec 2020. With Matt Buys (Datacite), Lars Bjornshauge (DOAJ), Arianna Becerill (Redalyc), Jeffrey Bilder (Crossref), Bianca Kramer (Utrecht University) and Cameron Neylon (COKI)

Abstract:
A number of principles have been established over recent years to stimulate OS infrastructure to become more open and remain so, including the Bilder, Lin and Neylon Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructures or the COAR/SPARC Good Practice Principles for Scholarly Communication Services. This session will address both the aims of such principles, but above all it will look at what applying good governance and open principles means in practice for OS infrastructures.  The session will first do this by sharing survey results drawn from the recently published Scoping the Open Science Infrastructure Landscape in Europe reporting on open maturity perceptions related to the COAR/SPARC Good Practice Principles for Scholarly Communication Services – examined in the field for the first time. It will also share some of the reported good open practices and challenges with being an open infrastructure in areas such as good governance, when providing open content, following open standards or being transparent. We will discuss to what extent organisational structures, contracts with third parties, IP policy, expertise or resources are critical in providing an open infrastructure. We will discuss why an open infrastructure is important for an OS ecosystem to thrive. These results will be discussed with a panel of diverse infrastructures representing a range of views on openness to explore how we as an OS infrastructure community can collaboratively help ensure a more open infrastructure ecosystem by discussing what is necessary to apply open principles effectively in practice.
 
You will need to register if you haven’t already done so.

See the full JROST Conference programme.
 
We hope you can make one or the other of the two events, or even both?

We really look forward to some lively discussions.
 
Let me know if you have any questions.
 
Best regards,

Vanessa Proudman, 
Director, SPARC Europe