OurResearch is committed to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI). This post summarizes how we are honoring these principles, as well as where we still have work left to do.
Since our beginning in an all-night hackathon ten years ago, we’ve tried to run OurResearch as a sustainable, open, and community-aligned provider of scholarly infrastructure. So while we didn’t write the POSI principles, we sure do recognize them: by and large, these are principles we’ve held (and argued for) from the beginning (eg: 2012, 2018). They’re consistent with our core values of openness, progress, pragmatism, sustainability, and community.
So when someone asked us recently if we endorse POSI, our answer was HECK YEAH! Today, we’d like to follow that up with a more concrete, public, and formal commitment to these principles. This commitment has been unanimously approved by our board of directors.
The sixteen POSI principles are divided into three sections: Insurance, Governance, and Sustainability. We’ve arranged the document below in the same way. For each principle, we begin with a short description (in italics), taken from the original POSI paper.
If an item has a green heart 💚, we think we’re doing a decent job of it. But that doesn’t mean we’re doing a perfect job. We’re not. We’re committed to continual improvement, and continual vigilance to make sure we honor our commitments. If there’s a yellow heart 💛, we think we’re making progress, but still have a ways to go. We’ll be continuing to work on it. That may take us a while; this is a journey. But we’ll get there.
Finally: our thanks to Geoff Bilder, Jennifer Lin, and Cameron Neylon for authoring the principles, and thanks to Crossref, Dryad, ROR, and JOSS for their early POSI commitments, which gave us great examples to follow.
Summary
Insurance
💚 Open source
💚 Open data (within constraints of privacy laws)
💚 Available data (within constraints of privacy laws)
💚 Patent non-assertion
Governance
💚 Coverage across the research enterprise
💛 Stakeholder Governed
💛 Non-discriminatory membership
💚 Transparent operations
💚 Cannot lobby
💚 Living will
💚 Formal incentives to fulfil mission & wind-down
Sustainability
💚 Time-limited funds are used only for time-limited activities
💚 Goal to generate surplus
💚 Goal to create contingency fund to support operations for 12 months
💚 Mission-consistent revenue generation
💚 Revenue based on services, not data
(💚 = good, 💛 = less good)
Insurance
💚 Open source
All software required to run the infrastructure should be available under an open source license. This does not include other software that may be involved with running the organisation.
All the source code behind everything we do is freely available on GitHub under the MIT open source license. This includes our products, websites, and the software behind the papers we publish. Our code is “born open” — we write it in the open, rather than periodically posting a cleaned-up “open version” later on. Source code is archived via Software Heritage, ensuring availability over the long haul.
💚 Open data (within constraints of privacy laws)
For an infrastructure to be forked it will be necessary to replicate all relevant data. The CC0 waiver is best practice in making data legally available. Privacy and data protection laws will limit the extent to which this is possible
OurResearch makes the data behind our projects open. For example, you can download a full dump of the Unpaywall database, all 120M+ rows of it, any time. This data dump is updated at least once a year. That same data is also available via a public, open API with generous rate limits (100,000 calls per day). Past projects (Impactstory Profiles, Depsy, Paperbuzz, etc) have also always had an open API, and we commit to similar approaches for future products.
Sometimes users share their private data with us, so that we can use that data to generate reports and analyses for them. For example, Unsub users upload their COUNTER data and price lists in order to inform an analytics dashboard we make for them. We never share that private data, or the data derived from it. However, we do encourage users to share their own data, and we never restrict our users’ right to access and share any data they get from us.
Some of our data, like Crossref’s, consists of facts that have no copyright. Where copyright is applicable, our data is licensed as CC0.
💚 Available data (within constraints of privacy laws)
It is not enough that the data be made “open” if there is not a practical way to actually obtain it. Underlying data should be made easily available via periodic data dumps.
As described above, OurResearch is committed to providing practical ways to obtain open data.
💚 Patent non-assertion
The organisation should commit to a patent non-assertion covenant. The organisation may obtain patents to protect its own operations, but not use them to prevent the community from replicating the infrastructure.
OurResearch believes patents do not belong in scholarly infrastructure. We will not pursue or assert patents. We will look into making a formal patent non-assertion covenant as suggested by Crossref.
Governance
💚 Coverage across the research enterprise
It is increasingly clear that research transcends disciplines, geography, institutions and stakeholders. The infrastructure that supports it needs to do the same.
We are committed to serving a diverse group of stakeholders across the research enterprise:
- Disciplines: our products cover the gamut of scholarly disciplines, including STEM, humanities, social sciences, and professional education.
- Geography: Our users are worldwide, on all continents (except Antarctica…we’re working on that one) and in nearly every country. We take care to support papers and other works written in all languages.
- Institutions and stakeholders: we serve all different kinds of institutions and stakeholders. Unsub users, for example, include not just the world’s largest research universities, but also industry labs, nonprofits, museums, community colleges, and philanthropies. Unpaywall is used by all of the above, as well as by academic publishers, library services companies (large and small), bibliometricians, research assessment exercises, and startups. The free Unpaywall extension currently has 400,000 active users, including large numbers of students, journalists, policy-makers, independent researchers, laypeople, and other historically neglected stakeholder groups.
By offering different types of products, aimed at different sets of stakeholders, we’re able to engage with a wide range of communities, and hear how their needs are similar, and how they’re different. We build infrastructure that cuts across communities where applicable–for instance, the open Unpaywall dataset is used in all kinds of ways. However, we also find places where a particular group would benefit from more customized tooling. For example, we built the Simple Query Tool (a web-based UI to Unpaywall) in response to requests from less technical users who wanted to access the database, but didn’t feel comfortable using a REST API. Later we built an Unpaywall repository dashboard for institutional repository librarians, a stakeholder group we didn’t originally consider.
Although we do strive to be inclusive, there are areas where we can continue to improve, and we intend to do so. For example, we’d like to improve our internationalization, by writing more documentation and UI components in languages besides English. In the next year we will be making an important stride to support diversity, as we provide better support for research works not assigned a DOI.
💛 Stakeholder Governed
A board-governed organisation drawn from the stakeholder community builds more confidence that the organisation will take decisions driven by community consensus and consideration of different interests.
OurResearch is a 501(c)3 organization, with a governance structure documented in its bylaws. Our Board of Directors, being a small group, is limited in its representation, in terms of geographic, ethnic, gender, disability, and organizational diversity. The current board includes those with work experience as a faculty member, publisher, library advocate, teacher, and infrastructure builder, with educational backgrounds in science, engineering, history, and business. While this does represent many aspects of our stakeholder community, the small size of our board limits the extent to which the range of stakeholders can be involved. We recognize that increasing the diversity of stakeholders on our Board is important to provide diverse perspectives. We will work towards improving this.
💛 Non-discriminatory membership
We see the best option as an “opt-in” approach with a principle of non-discrimination where any stakeholder group may express an interest and should be welcome. The process of representation in day to day governance must also be inclusive with governance that reflects the demographics of the membership.
OurResearch is not a membership based organization, but we fully support the principle of non-discrimination in our hiring, Board appointments, community engagement, outreach and all other activities. We engage our community through GitHub, Twitter, our mailing lists, and conferences (virtual and in-person), and welcome “opt-in” ideas from anyone at any time. We will also be launching an advisory group, to broaden the involvement of stakeholder groups as members of the community.
We do not currently have a formal Code Of Conduct to govern interactions between OurResearch employees and Board members and the OurResearch community. We are working on one.
Representation in day-to-day governance comes from our employees, Board of Directors, customer feedback, and engagement with the community online. However, because our Board is 50% women, 50% men, entirely white, non-disabled, and based solely in the USA and Canada, it does not fully reflect the demographics of our community of users, which is global in scope and more racially, ethnically, and gender, disability, and geographically diverse than our current board. We will work towards improving this.
💚 Transparent operations
Achieving trust in the selection of representatives to governance groups will be best achieved through transparent processes and operations in general (within the constraints of privacy laws).
OurResearch strives to be a transparent organization. As a 501(c)3 nonprofit, all of our tax returns are publicly available; you can find links to these on our transparency page. That page also publishes executive salaries, incorporation documents, bylaws, and other relevant information. All our grant proposals (funded and unfunded) are openly published and archived on Open Grants (search under “Piwowar” or “Priem”).
💚 Cannot lobby
The community, not infrastructure organisations, should collectively drive regulatory change. An infrastructure organisation’s role is to provide a base for others to work on and should depend on its community to support the creation of a legislative environment that affects it.
OurResearch is a mission-driven organization that works toward accelerating the transition to open science. We’re not lobbyists and we don’t lobby. As a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, we strictly adhere to U.S. limitations in this area.
💚 Living will
A powerful way to create trust is to publicly describe a plan addressing the condition under which an organisation would be wound down, how this would happen, and how any ongoing assets could be archived and preserved when passed to a successor organisation. Any such organisation would need to honour this same set of principles.
Our core assets are our source code and datasets. These are both open. Software is archived via Software Heritage assuring long-term persistence. Key datasets are integrated into other open datasets (eg, Unpaywall is part of the open DOIBoost dataset). Today and in the future, our data and code can be used by a wide variety of successor organizations.
We are a non-profit company without equity shares, so are unlikely to be bought or acquired. That said, we are looking into formal mechanisms to codify that any future disposal of our brand assets (trademarks, domain names, etc) could only be to organizations who honour the same principles.
💚 Formal incentives to fulfil mission & wind-down
Infrastructures exist for a specific purpose and that purpose can be radically simplified or even rendered unnecessary by technological or social change. If it is possible the organisation (and staff) should have direct incentives to deliver on the mission and wind down.
Many of the tools that OurResearch provides are “stop-gap” solutions. For example, in a world where all articles are open access at the time of publication, no open-access index like Unpaywall would be needed — the DOI would simply resolve to an open copy of the paper every time. Similarly, in a world without toll-access academic journals there is no longer a need for tools like Unsub to help librarians assess the value of journal subscriptions.
We eagerly look forward to the day when our stop-gaps are no longer needed! We also plan accordingly, and will wind down projects (or parts of projects) as they are no longer valuable to the community. We don’t have formal incentives for this, other than looking forward to a really big party.
Sustainability
💚 Time-limited funds are used only for time-limited activities
Day to day operations should be supported by day to day sustainable revenue sources. Grant dependency for funding operations makes them fragile and more easily distracted from building core infrastructure.
Currently earned revenue fully covers the day-to-day operations of OurResearch. When we get grants, we use them to support the development and early stages of new products, or to fund one-time enhancements of existing products. We will continue to work hard to ensure this remains true in the future.
💚 Goal to generate surplus
Organisations which define sustainability based merely on recovering costs are brittle and stagnant. It is not enough to merely survive, it has to be able to adapt and change. To weather economic, social and technological volatility, they need financial resources beyond immediate operating costs.
OurResearch currently has an operating surplus. This hasn’t always been true — we’ve had some lean years in the past — but it is certainly our goal to maintain a surplus in the future. Our deliberate decision to run with a relatively small number of staff makes it easier to achieve that goal. Our experience running in both rich and lean times over the last ten years makes us resilient to a wide range of financial contingencies.
💚 Goal to create contingency fund to support operations for 12 months
A high priority should be generating a contingency fund that can support a complete, orderly wind down (12 months in most cases). This fund should be separate from those allocated to covering operating risk and investment in development.
We currently have funds available to support our operations for 12 months. We have not formally set these aside as a contingency fund. We will create a Use Of Funds policy to make our contingency and wind-down funds more explicit.
💚 Mission-consistent revenue generation
Potential revenue sources should be considered for consistency with the organisational mission and not run counter to the aims of the organisation. For instance…
The earned revenue of OurResearch currently comes from service level agreements to the Unpaywall Data Feed and subscriptions to Unsub custom analytics services. Our revenue comes from a worldwide assortment of universities, university consortia, scholarly publishers, discovery services, and research analytics companies. We supplement our earned revenue with grants from mission-aligned organizations like the Arcadia Foundation.
💚 Revenue based on services, not data
Data related to the running of the research enterprise should be a community property. Appropriate revenue sources might include value-added services, consulting, API Service Level Agreements or membership fees.
OurResearch receives no revenue for its data, which is completely open, but rather for service level agreements and value-added services. We’re deeply committed to maintaining this model.
