Cite as “Bilder G, Lin J, Neylon C (2015) Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructure-v1, retrieved [date], //dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1314859“
Everything we have gained by opening content and data will be under threat if we allow the enclosure of scholarly infrastructures. We propose a set of principles by which Open Infrastructures to support the research community could be run and sustained. – Geoffrey Bilder, Jennifer Lin, Cameron Neylon
Over the past decade, we have made real progress to further ensure the availability of data that supports research claims. This work is far from complete. We believe that data about the research process itself deserves exactly the same level of respect and care. The scholarly community does not own or control most of this information. For example, we could have built or taken on the infrastructure to collect bibliographic data and citations but that task was left to private enterprise. Similarly, today the metadata generated in scholarly online discussions are increasingly held by private enterprises. They do not answer to any community board. They have no obligations to continue to provide services at their current rates, particularly when that rate is zero.
We do not contest the strengths of private enterprise: innovation and customer focus. There is a lot of exciting innovation in this space, much it coming from private, for profit interests, or public-private partnerships. Even publicly funded projects are under substantial pressures to show revenue opportunities. We believe we risk repeating the mistakes of the past, where a lack of community engagement lead to a lack of community control, and the locking up of community resources. In particular our view is that the underlying data that is generated by the actions of the research community should be a community resource – supporting informed decision making for the community as well as providing as base for private enterprise to provide value added services.
What should a shared infrastructure look like? Infrastructure at its best is invisible. We tend to only notice it when it fails. If successful, it is stable and sustainable. Above all, it is trusted and relied on by the broad community it serves. Trust must run strongly across each of the following areas: running the infrastructure (governance), funding it (sustainability), and preserving community ownership of it (insurance). In this spirit, we have drafted a set of design principles we think could support the creation of successful shared infrastructures.
If an infrastructure is successful and becomes critical to the community, we need to ensure it is not co-opted by particular interest groups. Similarly, we need to ensure that any organisation does not confuse serving itself with serving its stakeholders. How do we ensure that the system is run “humbly”, that it recognises it doesn’t have a right to exist beyond the support it provides for the community and that it plans accordingly? How do we ensure that the system remains responsive to the changing needs of the community?
Financial sustainability is a key element of creating trust. “Trust” often elides multiple elements: intentions, resources and checks and balances. An organisation that is both well meaning and has the right expertise will still not be trusted if it does not have sustainable resources to execute its mission. How do we ensure that an organisation has the resources to meet its obligations?
Even with the best possible governance structures, critical infrastructure can still be co-opted by a subset of stakeholders or simply drift away from the needs of the community. Long term trust requires the community to believe it retains control.
Here we can learn from Open Source practices. To ensure that the community can take control if necessary, the infrastructure must be “forkable.” The community could replicate the entire system if the organisation loses the support of stakeholders, despite all established checks and balances. Each crucial part then must be legally and technically capable of replication, including software systems and data.
Forking carries a high cost, and in practice this would always remain challenging. But the ability of the community to recreate the infrastructure will create confidence in the system. The possibility of forking prompts all players to work well together, spurring a virtuous cycle. Acts that reduce the feasibility of forking then are strong signals that concerns should be raised.
The following principles should ensure that, as a whole, the organisation in extremis is forkable:
Principles are all very well but it all boils down to how they are implemented. What would an organisation actually look like if run on these principles? Currently, the most obvious business model is a board-governed, not-for-profit membership organisation, but other models should be explored. The process by which a governing group is established and refreshed would need careful consideration and community engagement. As would appropriate revenue models and options for implementing a living will.
Many of the consequences of these principles are obvious. One which is less obvious is that the need for forkability implies centralization of control. We often reflexively argue for federation in situations like this because a single centralised point of failure is dangerous. But in our experience federation begets centralisation. The web is federated, yet a small number of companies (e.g., Google, Facebook, Amazon) control discoverability; the published literature is federated yet two organisations control the citation graph (Thomson Reuters and Elsevier via Scopus). In these cases, federation did not prevent centralisation and control. And historically, this has occurred outside of stewardship to the community. For example, Google Scholar is a widely used infrastructure service with no responsibility to the community. Its revenue model and sustainability are opaque.
Centralization can be hugely advantageous though – a single point of failure can also mean there is a single point for repair. If we tackle the question of trust head on instead of using federation as a way to avoid the question of who can be trusted, we should not need to federate for merely political reasons. We will be able to build accountable and trusted organisations that manage this centralization responsibly.
Is there any existing infrastructure organisation that satisfies our principles? ORCID probably comes the closest, which is not a surprise as our conversation and these principles had their genesis in the community concerns and discussions that led to its creation. The ORCID principles represented the first attempt to address the issue of community trust which have developed in our conversations since to include additional issues. Other instructive examples that provide direction include Wikimedia Foundation and CERN.
Ultimately the question we are trying to resolve is how do we build organizations that communities trust and rely on to deliver critical infrastructures. Too often in the past we have used technical approaches, such as federation, to combat the fear that a system can be co-opted or controlled by unaccountable parties. Instead we need to consider how the community can create accountable and trustworthy organisations. Trust is built on three pillars: good governance (and therefore good intentions), capacity and resources (sustainability), and believable insurance mechanisms for when something goes wrong. These principles are an attempt to set out how these three pillars can be consistently addressed.
The challenge of course lies in implementation. We have not addressed the question of how the community can determine when a service has become important enough to be regarded as infrastructure nor how to transition such a service to community governance. If we can answer that question the community must take the responsibility to make that decision. We therefore solicit your critique and comments on this draft list of principles. We hope to provoke discussion across the scholarly ecosystem from researchers to publishers, funders, research institutions and technology providers and will follow up with a further series of posts where we explore these principles in more detail.
The authors are writing in a personal capacity. None of the above should be taken as the view or position of any of our respective employers or other organisations.
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