Lesson 1: The Fundamentals of Open Infrastructure

Open Scholarly Infrastructure: Is an overarching term referring to digital tools, platforms, and services that are openly developed, accessible, and used to support the creation, dissemination, and preservation of research. They are open source, where the code and development processes are publicly available, developed and maintained by a community of users and developers, not a commercial entity. The infrastructures are interoperable with other open tools and platforms and connect with other important open infrastructures to build a connected and sustainable ecosystem. 

Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI): Is a framework for open scholarly infrastructure organisations and initiatives that support the research community. The principles aim to ensure that signatories are run and sustained in a manner that aligns with the goals of open science.
External Reading: The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure

Open Scholarly Publishing Platforms: Are open source, digital infrastructures for publishing and disseminating research. They provide the technology for supporting some or all of the major characteristics of scholarly publication such as submission, editorial, peer review, production, publication, display and archiving.
Examples: Kotahi, Open Journals Systems, Janeway

Preprint Servers: Are digital infrastructures (similar to a repository) where researchers can share their research articles as preprints before they undergo formal peer review and publication in a traditional journal.
Examples: BioRxiv, ArXiv, SocArXiv

Open Repositories: Are digital infrastructures that stores and provides free, immediate, and permanent access to research outputs. This includes research articles, datasets, software, and other scholarly materials. Open repositories can be institutional, subject-based, or general purpose with a core focus on providing a central location for research outputs to enhance the visibility, accessibility, and impact of research.
Examples: Zenodo, Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR)

Open Data Repositories: Are digital infrastructures that provide a centralised storage space for researchers to deposit and share datasets associated with their research. These could be subject-specific or general-purpose repositories but the core focus is to store, organise and preserve data whilst providing detailed metadata to enhance discoverability, encourage replicability and support reproducible research practices.
Examples: GenBank, Dryad, Dataverse

Open Citation Platforms: Are digital infrastructures that provide free access to citation data with rich meta-data in a structured, machine-readable format. This data can be used to analyse the impact of research, identify trends, and discover new connections between scholarly outputs.
Examples: CrossRef, DataCite, Open Citations

Open Identity Platforms: Are digital infrastructures that provide open persistent identifiers for managing researcher, institutional and funder identities. Open persistent identifiers provide a reliable and standardised way to identify entities in the scholarly ecosystem, leading to increased efficiency, accuracy, and transparency in identity data.
Examples: ROR, ORCID

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