By Kaitlin Thaney

We are excited to announce a $70K USD grant from Open Society Foundations (OSF), the world’s largest private funder of independent groups working for justice, democratic governance, and human rights.

The funding will help support a 1-year study of the European open infrastructure landscape and will help IOI gain insights into the state of open scholarly communications tooling and services in Europe.

The initiative will be led by SPARC Europe in partnership with Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI). IOI is an effort to enable durable, scalable, and long lasting open scientific and scholarly infrastructure to emerge, thrive, and deliver its benefits on a global scale. We are a global coalition of projects, organizations, and initiatives actively working to build a sustainable future for open scholarly infrastructure.

The project has the following aims:

  • Conduct a landscape analysis of the European scholarly communications infrastructure to gain understanding of the specificities of research and funding infrastructure in Europe;
  • Analyze and test Open scholarly communications principles
  • Advocate for the development of a more open infrastructure in Europe following open principles
  • Explore how IOI can provide value to the current European scholarly communication infrastructure.

We are grateful to OSF for their generous support to further expand our collective understanding of open infrastructure to benefit research and scholarship globally. This work would also not be possible without the support of our partners and Steering Committee members Vanesssa Proudman (SPARC Europe) and Pierrre Mounier (OPERAS). For more on the project, visit SPARC Europe’s website, and stay tuned for more in the coming months.

Posted by Invest In Open Infrastructure