Conference Opening Science to Meet Future Challenges, Warsaw, March 11, 2014, organized by Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling, University of Warsaw.

1. Sustainability and re-use as challenges for a
future open science landscape

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German Research Foundation (DFG)
Joint Information Systems Committee
(United Kingdom)
Denmark’s Electronic Research Library
SURF (Netherlands)
CSC – IT Center for Science (Finland)
Shared aim: innovative use of ICT
to support Research and Education
Who is Knowledge Exchange?

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Our vision since 2005
“To make a layer of scholarly and scientific content
openly available on the Internet”
Edinburgh October 2012

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Activities relating to OA/OS in the years 2005-2014
 Petition to EU for guaranteed public access to
publicly-funded research results
 Three national studies comparing
costs and benefits of Open Access
 Briefing papers on Open Access and Copyright
 Metrics – sharing / connecting Usage
Statistics; metrics for research data
 Author Identifiers - a summit with global key
players
 Authority Files report
 Studies on how to make
OA services sustainable

5. Sustainability of open access infrastructures
• Sustainability of Open Access Services Reports
– Phase 1 and 2: Scoping the challenge and consulting the
stakeholders
– Phase 3: The Collective Provision of Open Access Resources
• Sustainability of Open Access Services Workshops
− International Service Providers (2013)
− Sustainable Business models for Open Access Services (2014)
http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/Default.aspx?ID=676
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6. Issues for sustainable operation of OA services
• Services that form an OA ecology (e.g. repository support, journal listings,
journal platforms, repository platforms, repositories, searching services,
identifier services) are often founded and funded on a project basis.
• Business intelligence and models required for operation but not only under
market conditions. Also viable organisational models needed (short-term
staff, expertise).
• Funders not currently able to sustain on a long-term-basis; vulnerability of
services. Scalability of membership models? Services used, but not
supported internationally.
• Analysis of interdependence necessary. “Birds-eve-view “on ecology and
coordination (accountability, governance, shared infrastructure).
• Evolving and dynamic landscape and complex wider service ecology.
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7. Solutions?
• Individual and adequate business models needed; best practices to
drive down costs can help.
• Possibly supernational umbrella organisation to bundle OA
infrastructure services and to manage sustainability.
• Business intelligence, skills and expertise form part of sustainability
planning already required at the outset; Sustainability Index
developed to help assess this. Also professional development
courses for service providers.
• Should research funders dedicate 0.5% of budget to OA services?
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8. Re-use
• Authority files and interoperability
− Technical interoperability for use, but also for sustainability of
services
− Coherent linkage of differenty types of reasearch material
• Licensing
– Clear licensing of research output specifying re-use conditions
– Widest possible re-use
• Metrics
– Reliable statistics (not from commercial vendors!) for OA
publication usage and research data
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9. Questions?
angela.holzer@dfg.de
Please also see
www.knowledge-exchange.info
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