Open Science Infrastructure

Open Science Infrastructure (or open scholarly infrastructure) is information infrastructure that supports the open sharing of scientific productions such as publications, datasets, metadata or code. In November 2021 the Unesco recommendation on Open Science describes it as "shared research infrastructures that are needed to support open science and serve the needs of different communities".^[1]

Open science infrastructures are a form of scientific infrastructure (also called cyberinfrastructure, e-Science or e-infrastructure) that support the production of open knowledge. Beyond the management of common resources, they are frequently structured as community-led initiatives with a set collective norms and governance regulations, which makes them also a form of knowledge commons. The definition of open science infrastructures usually exclude privately owned scientific infrastructures run by leading commercial publishers. Conversely it may include actors not always characterized as scientific infrastructures that play a critical role in the ecosystem of open science, such as publishing platforms in open access (open scholarly communication service).

Computing infrastructures and online services have played a key role in the production and diffusion of scientific knowledge since the 1960s. While these early scientific infrastructure were initially envisioned as community initiatives, they could not be openly used due to the lack of interconnectivity and the cost of network connection. The creation of the World Wide Web made it possible to share data and publications on a large scale. The sustainability of online research projects and services became a critical policy issue and entailed the development of major infrastructure in the 2000s.

The concept of open science infrastructure emerged after 2015 following a scientific policy debate over the expansion of commercial and privately owned infrastructures in numerous research activities and the publication of the Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructures. Since the 2010s, large ecosystems of interconnected scientific infrastructures have emerged in Europe, South and North America through the development of new open science project and the conversion of legacy infrastructures to open science principles.