TSOSI, a new platform to broaden support to open science infrastructure

This poster summarizes the goal and methodology of the Transparency to Sustain Open Science infrastructure (TSOSI) project. Launched in September 2024, TSOSI aims to strengthen the sustainability of open science infrastructure. How? By highlighting the governments, institutions, library consortia and other organizations that have financially supported open science infrastructure. TSOSI’s guiding principle is: “The more we highlight those who have funded, the more funders we will attract”.
Open science infrastructures typically do not rely on selling services; instead they support research as a common good. These infrastructures can reach sustainability only if research stakeholders contribute financially to their budgets. However, we find that only a few research stakeholders do so. For instance, the publishing platform SciPost has reported that just 135 institutions have financially contributed, despite 12,000 institutions benefiting from its services. The goal of TSOSI is to increase the number of funders and retain them.
TSOSI takes a data-driven approach: it collects data on funding and enriches it with persistent identifiers. Its main output is a web platform that enables users to explore who has funded what. By displaying this data, we aim to facilitate the decision making process to fund these infrastructures.
The project is led led by the Université Grenoble Alpes and funded by the French Committee for open science of the French Ministry of Research. The partners of the project are DOAB, DOAJ, SCOSS SciPost, PeerCommunityIn, OPERAS, and Couperin.