With the rapid growth in open-access policies and mandates across Europe and worldwide, shared infrastructure and services are now critical to the efficiency and effectiveness of open access publication. These services include software, platforms, information and data services, and support and advice, without which it would be difficult or impossible for open-access publication at the scale now required by funders to be delivered. Recent work by Knowledge Exchange (KE) on sustainable business models for OA has highlighted the challenges involved in successful, sustainable open access service provision, but the link between open-access policy-making, services and infrastructure remains unclear.
The Knowledge Exchange, an international partnership of organisations in the UK, Netherlands, Germany, Finland and Denmark, has therefore commissioned a project, led by Research Consulting, to clarify and raise awareness of these dependencies. The objective of this work is to establish and demonstrate clearly to policy makers the importance of particular services to the implementation of their OA policies.
As part of their work, the Research Consulting team will be seeking input from a number of experts and stakeholders across the five Knowledge Exchange countries and beyond in order to develop a set of archetypical policies, use cases and service dependencies. The results of the work will be discussed at two workshops to be held with key stakeholders in Autumn 2015, and summarised in a final report due for release later this year.
