The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) recently announced its Round 6 Open Infrastructures Funding Cycle.
SCOSS is a network of influential organisations committed to helping secure Open access (OA) and open science (OS) infrastructure well into the future. SCOSS helps identify non-commercial services essential to open science, and makes qualified recommendations on which of these services should be considered for funding support. Only non-commercial services on unsound financial footing are eligible. SCOSS provides the framework and funding structure, vetting potential candidates based on a defined set of criteria. The most eligible of those that pass the vigorous evaluation are then presented to the global OA/OS community of stakeholders with an appeal for monetary support in a crowdfunding-style approach.
Ireland’s National Action Plan for Open Research 2022–2030, which outlines objectives and actions to support Ireland’s translation towards open research, includes a commitment to ‘[s]upport the open infrastructure for scholarly communication that underpins bibliodiversity in the international context by funding and establishing connections to initiatives such as the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS)’. As the coordinating body for the National Open Research Forum (NORF), the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) is pleased to share details of the SCOSS Round 6 Open Infrastructures Funding Cycle, which invites the OA/OS community to fund the following OS infrastructures:
African Journals Online (AJOL)
African Journals Online (AJOL) is the preeminent platform of African scholarly publishing. The academic journal publishing ecosystem—and research in general—continues to be dominated by the global north. For over 25 years, AJOL has worked to address this imbalance by expanding continental and global access to quality-assessed African research journals by providing free online hosting, technical support, assessment feedback, and training to hundreds of African journals. Demand for these services continues to grow. There are millions of article downloads from the platform each month. We work hard to foster no fee open access publishing in the region. AJOL’s vision is for African research to play a meaningful role in real-world constructive change by ensuring an equitable role for Africa in global scholarly publishing. By supporting AJOL, you are amplifying the voices of African researchers.
- SCOSS funding target for African Journals Online (AJOL): € 630,000
- If you are interested in pledging to African Journals Online (AJOL), download the SCOSS African Journals Online (AJOL) flyer, which includes details about the suggested funding structure.
- Ready to pledge? Contact: Susan Murray susan@ajol.info or Ivy Mutambanengwe Matanga ivy@ajol.info.
Episciences
Episciences is an overlay journal platform to host and disseminate diamond open access (OA) publications from all disciplines. Documents published by overlay journals are hosted in open repositories such as arXiv, HAL, Zenodo, bioRxiv and medRxiv. Episciences offers a free, modern, flexible, and cost-effective platform for academic publishing designed to align with open science principles and meet the evolving needs of the research community. It also offers libraries and funders immediate, free access to scientific content. The platform is an innovative solution in the scientific publishing landscape, promoting transparency, immediacy, and open access to research across diverse fields and geographical locations. By supporting Episciences, you are strengthening a publishing platform that is both academic-led and academic-owned. Your contribution helps us support new journals and advance publishing tools built on open repositories and infrastructures.
- SCOSS funding target for Episciences: € 397,250
- If you are interested in pledging to Episciences, download the SCOSS Episciences flyer, which includes details about the suggested funding structure.
- Ready to pledge? Contact: Raphaël Tournoy at membership@episciences.org
Make Data Count
Make Data Count collects, standardises, and aggregates meaningful measures of data usage and data citation. Make Data Count is an initiative that promotes the development of responsible,meaningful data metrics to enable evaluations of data usage. Make Data Count develops tools and workflows to collect, aggregate, and display data citations. Our open corpus of data citations is a vital resource to expand the number and coverage of data citations available to the community. Repositories, publishers, and platforms rely on Make Data Count frameworks, co-created with the community to standardise and report data view and download counts. All data usage measures are available under a CC0 licence, and accessible by humans and machines via an API and public data file. Supporting Make Data Count ensures that critical information about data usage remains openly available while advancing the technical infrastructure, standards, and community collaboration needed to assess, evaluate, and reward data as a primary research object.
- SCOSS funding target for Make Data Count: € 590,127
- If you are interested in pledging to Make Data Count, download the SCOSS Make Data Count flyer, which includes details about the suggested funding structure.
- Ready to pledge? Contact: Iratxe Puebla at info@makedatacount.org
SciPost
SciPost is a grassroots, by-and-for scientists initiative whose mission is to provide a complete publishing infrastructure based on Genuine Open Access principles. SciPost offers a fully-featured online infrastructure covering publishing needs from preprints to metadata, with a strong emphasis on leveraging openness to maintain high editorial quality. It is entirely not-for-profit, owned and operated by the community, open and accessible to authors and readers worldwide, and it makes use of open licences with copyright retained by its authors. SciPost positions itself as the antithesis to subscriptions and the antidote to APCs. Its cost-slashing operations are rooted in its PubFracs business model linking publishing activities to benefitting organisations. By supporting SciPost, you will contribute to ensuring the initiative’s sustainability, enabling it to expand services to a wider, more diverse community, and empowering it to continue being a driving force in bringing about a more open, high-quality, and affordable future for academic publishing.
- SCOSS funding target for SciPost: € 627,000
- If you are interested in pledging to SciPost, download the SCOSS SciPost flyer, which includes details about the suggested funding structure.
- Ready to pledge? Contact: Jean-Sébastien Caux at sponsors@scipost.org
Find out more about SCOSS Funding Cycles on their website.
