At the Open Science FAIR 2025 at CERN, we convened a panel that many would have previously considered unlikely: bringing together voices from commercial publishing, open source foundations, research infrastructure organizations, and libraries to explore how seemingly opposing interests can find common ground. What emerged was a nuanced conversation about the reality of building sustainable open science ecosystems, one that requires us to move beyond simplistic "us versus them" narratives.
The False Binary of Commercial vs. Open
The panel, moderated by Emma Green, IOI’s Director of Development, challenged a fundamental assumption that permeates many open science discussions: that commercial and non-commercial interests are inherently incompatible.
Felix Reda from GitHub's public policy team put it plainly: "Open and commercial don't have to be opposites, but you can design a business model in a way that actually supports openness and rewards openness." He pointed to the success of open source software, where companies routinely collaborate on shared infrastructure while competing in their end products—a model that could offer lessons for the broader research ecosystem.
Matt Cannon from Taylor & Francis brought a publisher's perspective to this complexity: "I work for a commercial publisher, and there are people who fundamentally disagree with that... But I also feel like there's plenty of other spaces where we can go and collaborate and feel like we have knowledge and skills and understanding that can contribute."
When Collaboration Works, and When It Doesn't
The panelists didn't shy away from discussing successes and failures in trying unconventional partnerships. Cannon shared the story of a code-sharing workflow that Taylor & Francis had to bring to a close, revealing a fundamental lesson about collaboration: "The thing that had been built didn't work. So the workflow that we've created didn't really align with the way that people actually handle their code." In other words, the team had built for researchers rather than with them, missing the essential step of understanding actual workflows and needs; but presenting an opportunity for future collaboration.
The discussion also highlighted how personal risk complicates organizational collaboration and can result in risk aversion or unwise entrenchment. As Cannon noted: "When you work in a commercial company... you don't want to be the one whose project failed. So it does take a bit of a change of mindset to be able to say: I think we should just stop doing this." Sally Chambers from DARIAH and the British Library reinforced this, emphasizing the need for "safe space to fail" in innovation work.
This reveals something crucial: although we talk about collaborations between organizations, they're fundamentally collaborations between people. For unconventional partnerships to work, creating psychological and "political" safety for experimentation and cutting losses while maintaining good relationships becomes essential.
In contrast, successful collaborations emerged when stakeholders brought complementary strengths to shared challenges. Reda highlighted GitHub's Secure Open Source Fund, which addresses security in widely-used open source projects by combining company funding with civil society expertise: "Everybody kind of brings something important to the project to make it succeed."
The Business Model Challenge
The discussion revealed a complex tension around sustainability and compensation that goes deeper than simple power imbalances. While Reda emphasized that companies should "pay [contributors] for their time" when collaborating with civil society, Chambers highlighted a different challenge: many researchers lack the "business acumen" to even know how to ask for appropriate compensation or structure sustainable partnerships.
This points to a broader problem: the open science community often lacks the language, frameworks, and examples needed to explore sustainable business models. Chambers herself embodied this tension, admitting her discomfort with the British Library's move toward cost recovery models: "I'm not... necessarily [knowing] how to develop business models, how to do cost recovery. And I still am not quite 100% comfortable with it."
The challenge isn't just identifying existing business models to copy, panelists said, but also knowing what questions to ask when exploring sustainability, which is a skills gap that hampers resilience and innovation in this space.
Panelists offered glimpses of what's possible. Chambers described working with small companies that "develop open source" software and "make their money... on the licensing or providing support." Reda pointed to "pay to close" models in open source, where software is available under copyleft licenses but companies can pay for different licensing terms that don't require them to open source their own work.
Beyond Ideological Purity: Facing Real-World Challenges
Perhaps the most striking moment came when Sven Fund from Reviewer Credits challenged the entire framing of the commercial versus non-commercial debate:
"During the last fifteen years or so that I have been in this openness conversation... we always had the clash of worlds between profit and not for profit. And my impression is that it is a little bit like an expert debate. The world doesn't care…. I would really like us to focus a little bit more on the world’s problems […]: Infrastructure that is going away because authoritarian regimes around the world do what they want with the research ecosystem."
Fund's perspective, shaped by recent threats to research infrastructure in various countries, highlighted the fragility of systems we often take for granted. The stability of research infrastructure, he argued, matters more than the funding model behind it.
The panel also grappled with a sobering reality: while the open science community has made significant advances, there's still "a long tail of people behind that are still getting to grips with a lot of the basics," as Cannon put it. The challenge isn't just building better systems, but ensuring they're accessible to researchers across different career stages, geographies, and disciplines.
Moving Forward: Governance, Not Ideology
One audience member raised a critical question about governance in collaborative spaces, drawing parallels to industrial districts where competitors share resources while maintaining competition. The panelists pointed to examples like Crossref, where publishers collaborated to create persistent identifiers, as models for how the sector can work together on non-competitive infrastructure while competing elsewhere.
The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, developed ten years ago, offer another framework. As one audience member noted, these principles focus on transparency in governance and sustainability rather than profit status: "they don't really mention anything about being nonprofit or for profit."
A Call for Nuanced Collaboration
What emerged from this discussion wasn't a naive call for everyone to simply get along, but rather a sophisticated understanding of how different stakeholders can collaborate despite, or perhaps because of, their different motivations and constraints.
The path forward requires:
- Recognition of complementary strengths: Libraries excel at curation, companies at scale and operations, civil society organizations at community building.
- Fair compensation and power-sharing: Ensuring collaborations don't exploit volunteer labour or marginalize smaller voices.
- Focus on shared infrastructure: Building robust, resilient systems that serve everyone's interests.
- Transparency in governance: Clear frameworks for how decisions are made and responsibilities shared.
- Pragmatic idealism: Working toward open science goals while acknowledging real-world constraints and incentives.
Join the Conversation
This panel represents just one conversation in a much larger dialogue that our research ecosystem desperately needs. Too often, discussions about sustainability in open science happen in silos: researchers talking to researchers, publishers to publishers, funders to funders. Real progress requires bringing these voices together, creating spaces for honest dialogue about motivations, constraints, and opportunities.
The challenges facing research infrastructure, from cybersecurity threats to funding pressures to geopolitical instability, are too complex for any single sector to solve alone. They require the kind of nuanced, multi-stakeholder collaboration that this panel began to explore.
Ready to continue this conversation? We believe this type of cross-sector dialogue is essential for building a more sustainable and resilient research ecosystem. If your organization is interested in:
- Hosting similar convenings that bring together diverse stakeholders around shared challenges
- Developing collaborative frameworks that respect different motivations while achieving common goals
- Building bridges between commercial and non-commercial actors in your sector
- Creating governance models for shared infrastructure initiatives
We'd like to work with you. Our experience in facilitating these complex conversations, and our commitment to finding practical paths forward, can help your community navigate these critical discussions.
Contact us to explore how we can design and facilitate the conversations your sector needs to thrive.
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This blog post was developed with assistance from AI tools (Claude 4) and has been reviewed by IOI staff.