[IRTalk] Invest in Open Infrastructure - opportunity for Africa to demonstrate its support for Open Source

[Ina Smith]

Dear Colleagues

It is a privilege for the African Open Science Platform project to represent Africa as part of this global initiative. Please consider demonstrating your support on behalf of your organisation, or on individual level (in personal capacity), by completing the brief online form at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScKPAc1sFT2DbUn_1E36d_o2bvaoGeO87fNGmrYH0qNVhiJHA/viewform Read more at https://investinopen.org/supporters/ Thank to those who have already signed! This is a great opportunity for Africa to make its voice count.

See the interview with the Dan Whaley, the CEO of the "Invest in Open Infrastructure" (IOI) initiative:

Invest in Open Infrastructure: An Interview with Dan Whaley - by Roger C. Schonfeld

https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2019/06/12/invest-open-infrastructure/


Infrastructure is vital for scientists, publishers, libraries, and everyone involved in scholarly research and communication and its assessment and showcasing. For several years, I have been tracking some of the major efforts to build and control portfolios, if not platforms, of scholarly research and communication infrastructure and services<https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2017/11/07/strategy-integration-workflow-providers/> - and the implications for the academy<https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/big-deal-research-infrastructure/>. It is a major story of mergers and acquisitions by (and organic growth within) the likes of Elsevier, Clarivate's Web of Science group, and Holtzbrinck's Digital Science. At the same time, there is also a wave of effort to build various types of open source infrastructure in support of scholarly publishing (such as CoKo<https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/12/17/is-coko-the-beginnings-of-a-shared-infrastructure/>), open science (such as the Center for Open Science<https://sr.ithaka.org/blog/the-center-for-open-science-alternative-to-elsevier-announces-new-preprint-services-today/>), and library-based scholarly communication (such as DuraSpace<https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2019/01/25/lyrasis-duraspace-merger/>). Several of the foremost enterprises in this open source arena recently joined forces with a group of universities that direct funding to open source projects to call for greater resources to be invested in support. This Invest in Open Infrastructure <https://investinopen.org/> (IOI) initiative, though nascent, may be the best hope to date of some kind of common collective action. To learn more about this initiative and some of its future plans, I interviewed Dan Whaley, the CEO of open source annotation initiative Hypothes.is, who is one of IOI's leaders. The answers below are his, with some edits to language contributed by Kristen Ratan, Mike Roy and David Lewis.
With kind regards
Ina

Ina Smith
Project Manager African Open Science Platform
Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf)

Phone: +27 12 349 6600
Email: ina at assaf.org.za<mailto:ina at assaf.org.za>

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