The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) offers a set of guidelines by which open scholarly infrastructure organisations and initiatives that support the research community can be run and sustained. OPERAS builds on these principles as a signal of our commitment to serve the research community in the long run. In this post, we demonstrate OPERAS’s commitment to adhere to these principles and show our current progress in achieving these aims.
Bilder G, Lin J, Neylon C (2020), The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, retrieved [date], https://doi.org/10.24343/C34W2H
The principles are divided into three main categories; Governance, Sustainability and Insurance:
Governance*
*Legend: OK compliant, = making progress, X not compliant
| Principle | Compliance | Self-assessment |
| Coverage across the research enterprise – it is increasingly clear that research transcends disciplines, geography, institutions and stakeholders. The infrastructure that supports it needs to do the same. | OK | The OPERAS portfolio offers services for publishing, monitoring, and discovering research activities across countries and research actors, such as researchers, organisations, policy-makers, publishers, research communities, librarians and research infrastructures. Though the OPERAS Research Infrastructure focuses on the Social Sciences and Humanities domain, which in itself covers 27 disciplines), it also transcends disciplines through its active support to Diamond OA Journals. OPERAS AISBL gathers more than 50 organisations in Europe and makes all its services available for European researchers with a strong focus on multilingualism. |
| Stakeholder Governed – a board-governed organisation drawn from the stakeholder community builds more confidence that the organisation will take decisions driven by community consensus and consideration of different interests. | OK | OPERAS RI is governed by an Executive Assembly that represents the diversity of its community (publishers, researchers, in different disciplines). The Executive Assembly meets every month to take all the necessary strategic decisions mainly via consensus or via open voting process if needed. In addition, the OPERAS Assembly of the Commons is a body which gathers the members so that they are represented at the General Assembly. The two chairs of the Assembly of the Commons have voting rights at the General Assembly. |
| Non-discriminatory membership – we see the best option as an “opt-in” approach with a principle of non-discrimination where any stakeholder group may express an interest and should be welcome. The process of representation in day to day governance must also be inclusive with governance that reflects the demographics of the membership. | OK | OPERAS AISBLhas established a gender equality plan which will be completed by a HR equality plan (beg. Of 2023). A number of values support the governance and membership of OPERAS such as inclusiveness and diversity. OPERAS has a statement in its hiring process as well as it can be seen here: https://operas-eu.org/calls-and-job-opportunities/ |
| Transparent operations – achieving trust in the selection of representatives to governance groups will be best achieved through transparent processes and operations in general (within the constraints of privacy laws). | OK | OPERAS members are approved by the Executive Assembly after a meeting with one of the coordinators and the national representative of the country. To become a member, the Rules of Participation must be signed with OPERAS values and in particular the transparency. Updates of the work in the different bodies are regularly made in the other bodies to facilitate the knowledge sharing within the infrastructure. OPERAS has a Terms of Reference (ToR) for the STB that outlines operational processes and procedures. |
| Cannot lobby – the community, not infrastructure organisations, should collectively drive regulatory change. An infrastructure organisation’s role is to provide a base for others to work on and should depend on its community to support the creation of a legislative environment that affects it. | OK | This is typically done through the national nodes but also because the services for instance or the future activities of OPERAS are prepared by the Special Interest Groups (SIGs) of OPERAS which gather the community. |
| Living will – a powerful way to create trust is to publicly describe a plan addressing the condition under which an organisation would be wound down, how this would happen, and how any ongoing assets could be archived and preserved when passed to a successor organisation. Any such organisation would need to honour this same set of principles. | X | |
| Formal incentives to fulfil mission & wind-down – infrastructures exist for a specific purpose and that purpose can be radically simplified or even rendered unnecessary by technological or social change. If it is possible the organisation (and staff) should have direct incentives to deliver on the mission and wind down. | X |
Sustainability*
| Principle | Compliance | Self-assessment |
| Time-limited funds are used only for time-limited activities – day to day operations should be supported by day to day sustainable revenue sources. Grant dependency for funding operations makes them fragile and more easily distracted from building core infrastructure. | = | Fees from core and supporting members Renting of OPERAS office |
| Goal to generate surplus – organisations which define sustainability based merely on recovering costs are brittle and stagnant. It is not enough to merely survive, it has to be able to adapt and change. To weather economic, social and technological volatility, they need financial resources beyond immediate operating costs. | = | Percentage of OPERAS budget for R&I; AISBL fees; freemium model for some services and donation system which is planned for the discovery service, GoTriple. This work is currently under progress. |
| Goal to create contingency fund to support operations for 12 months – a high priority should be generating a contingency fund that can support a complete, orderly wind down (12 months in most cases). This fund should be separate from those allocated to covering operating risk and investment in development. | OK | Already started. OPERAS is getting to have a contingency fund in the accounting and separate it from the other provisions that might be constituted. |
| Mission-consistent revenue generation – potential revenue sources should be considered for consistency with the organisational mission and not run counter to the aims of the organisation. For instance… | = | OPERAS services are currently working on different freemium models. For instance donations for the discovery service of GoTriple. |
| Revenue based on services, not data – data related to the running of the research enterprise should be a community property. Appropriate revenue sources might include value-added services, consulting, API Service Level Agreements or membership fees. | = | OPERAS has membership fees and the revenues are based on services (see above). The Executive Assembly is also considering launching a new service category called “professional services” in which we have consultancy packages for specific topics i.e. FAIR, ITSM, … |
Insurance*
| Principle | Compliance | Self-assessment |
| Open source – All software required to run the infrastructure should be available under an open source licence. This does not include other software that may be involved with running the organisation. | OK | Our first approach is open source both in what we adopt and deliver, however, we aren’t strictly limited to only open source, and each service and technology is evaluated on an individual basis, but we do strive for open source as the first option. |
| Open data (within constraints of privacy laws) – For an infrastructure to be forked it will be necessary to replicate all relevant data. The CC0 waiver is best practice in making data legally available. Privacy and data protection laws will limit the extent to which this is possible. | OK | GoTriple data is globally ok: the generation processes are documented, the data is available in OAI-PMH, etc. Regarding the pathfinder and the metrics, this is currently under review. |
| Available data (within constraints of privacy laws) – It is not enough that the data be made “open” if there is not a practical way to actually obtain it. Underlying data should be made easily available via periodic data dumps. | OK | This is the case for the GoTriple service where data dumps. |
| Patent non-assertion – The organisation should commit to a patent non-assertion covenant. The organisation may obtain patents to protect its own operations, but not use them to prevent the community from replicating the infrastructure. | OK | OPERAS AISBL commits to a patent non-assertion covenant. Generally speaking, OPERAS AISBL promotes open source services and its services are open source whenever it’s possible. |
Last updated September 2024