SPARC Europe aims to enable an OS infrastructure to emerge and thrive by making concerted efforts to explore how we as a community can better sustain it. For the past few years, SPARC Europe has been involved with various efforts to help secure the essential field of Open services that have sprung up in recent years, and that underpin Open Access and Open Science in Europe. Read more about our main efforts here:
The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS)
SPARC Europe co-ordinates this global effort established in 2017.
Helping secure selected open research infrastructure through crowd-funding. More than 4.5m euros raised; encouraging the support of ten OS infrastructures worldwide.
Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI)
SPARC Europe served on the Steering Group of IOI for several years.
We stay connected to bring the interests of Europe to the global strategic approach to funding OA/OS infrastructure.
10 key interviews with OS infrastructure on their journeys to sustainability
These 10 interviews highlight some of the key decision-making points, funding mechanisms and models, and other learnings from a series of commonly used services and technologies used to support research and scholarship. These include both for-profit and not-for-profit services, highlighting perspectives on sustainability across the sector.
Skim the top-level lessons here.
2020 survey to Scope the Open Science Infrastructure Landscape in Europe
In Spring 2020 we launched a survey to Scope the Open Science Infrastructure Landscape in Europe to gain a better understanding of existing OA and OS infrastructure/resources in Europe so that these services have a greater chance of garnering the funding support they may need in future.
We published the culminating report in late 2020. It shows a diverse, interconnected, open, professional and viable, developing OS ecosystem in Europe; one that is worth investing in. At the same time, this developing ecosystem faces a range of issues that challenge its path to a more open and sustainable future.
View the OSI survey instrument, and Read the report. Skim the top-level report results in a related one-pager here.
The interviews and survey work was supported by the Open Society Foundations, and was in collaboration with Invest in Open Infrastructure.