How a New Data Platform Sheds Light on Open Science Funding

When an institution supports an open infrastructure financially, it typically receives a logo placement on a website in return. Transparency to Sustain Open Science Infrastructure (TSOSI), an initiative for which I am project leader, goes further: by offering a centralized data platform to collect and share data on open infrastructure funding, TSOSI illuminates for all stakeholders the open science funding landscape. Its guiding principle is that the more we highlight those who have supported open infrastructures, the more supporters we will attract.

Why is open science infrastructure funding important?

Open access advocates have been highlighting the importance of funding open science infrastructure since the mid-2010s. In his famous “2.5 percent commitment,” for example, David Lewis (2017) called on every research library to commit 2.5 percent of its total budget to support open infrastructures and platforms. In 2017, the Sustainable Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) released its first funding call, inviting every institution to financially contribute to open infrastructures. Following its 2021 recommendation on Open Science, UNESCO suggested governments, funders, and research performing organizations incorporate the principles of open science into existing science funding schemes and mechanisms (UNESCO, 2022).

TSOSI fits in this context. The platform came out of a project launched in September 2024, funded by the French National Fund for Open Science with the University of Grenoble Alpes, located in France, as the lead institution. Released in June 2025 as a beta version, its goal is to broaden financial support made to open science infrastructure, and, therefore, to contribute to its sustainability.

How does TSOSI work?

Technical solutions, like OpenAPC and the ESAC Registry, have made payments for open access publishing more transparent. But when it comes to payments made toward open infrastructures, a lack of transparency remains, as highlighted in the report Study on Scientific Publishing in Europe: Development, Diversity, and Transparency of Costs (European Commission, 2024). TSOSI is dedicated to reducing this lack.

TSOSI is a data platform designed to make visible which organizations have financially supported which open infrastructures. In the current beta version, it includes data provided by five infrastructures—Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), SciPost, PeerCommunityIn, and Open Scholarly Communication in the European Research Area for the Social Sciences and Humanities (OPERAS)—revealing a small segment of the open science funding landscape. Information about the financial support these infrastructures have received was already partly available on their websites—see, for example, the supporters’ webpage of the DOAJ—but TSOSI represents an important step forward. Instead of appearing fragmented on websites, encapsulated into webpages, and without identifiers, this information is now collected on a centralized data platform where it is structured and enriched with the two key identifiers—Research Organization Registry (ROR) and Wikidata. These identifiers then permit the collection of information about organizations, such as country, geographical location, Wikipedia description, and logos.

The platform includes a world map with a dot representing each of the organizations that have financially supported the open infrastructures in TSOSI; each dot links to an informational page for the funding organization, where all of its financial support known to TSOSI is listed (Figure 1).

How will TSOSI impact the funding of open infrastructures?

We want to make funding for open science infrastructure the norm: financially supporting open infrastructures should feel as ordinary as buying any product. Libraries have tools like COUNTER Metrics, the ESAC Registry, Unsub, and OpenAPC to compare and benchmark publishers, and they often have standard ways to communicate about new or renewed contracts with traditional publishers. But they are unlikely to have a procedure in place to communicate their support of open infrastructures. Most of the time, financial support of open infrastructure stays hidden.

We want to reduce the gap between all the information that is produced during and after an organization makes a deal with a traditional publisher and the information that is produced before and after an organization grants financial support to an open infrastructure. By highlighting these financial supports, TSOSI aims to make them traceable, explorable, and, most of all, evident.

TSOSI and related initiatives

TSOSI complements the work of the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS). SCOSS mobilizes institutions to support open infrastructures, while TSOSI allows everyone to see which organizations have supported which open infrastructures. A member from SCOSS serves on TSOSI’s advisory board, illustrating the organizations’ collaboration and shared goals.

TSOSI also shares a common mission with another infrastructure for cost data transparency recently highlighted in Katina: openCost (Schweighofer & Bartlewski, 2024). openCost enables institutions to publish open data on publishing costs, including publish-and-read agreements as well as financial commitments made to open infrastructures—as is exemplified by the University of Regensburg’s reporting on its support of DOAJ. TSOSI, in turn, aims to promote and aggregate this institutional data.

TSOSI’s work is also related to that of Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI), and more specifically its Infra Finder tool, as both shed light on open infrastructures. TSOSI highlights the organizations that support open infrastructures, enabling users to explore a network composed of institutions, consortia, and infrastructures. Infra Finder focuses on the infrastructures as such. Another difference is that TSOSI focuses on financial information, while Infra Finder provides broader information about infrastructures, including their missions, governance models, technical features, and community engagement.

Conclusion

Over time, we intend to improve TSOSI by integrating additional data from infrastructures, as well as from institutions, library consortia, and research funding organizations. One challenge will be to identify and reconcile similar records originating from different sources.

We’ve received encouraging feedback from the open science community, but what is exciting is that, since the data published by the platform is new, we don’t yet know all the ways it could be used. During a recent webinar, a participant observed that TSOSI could serve as a tool for identifying institutions that demonstrate maturity in supporting open science, making them strong candidates to host events highlighting the importance of investing in open infrastructures—what has been memorably described by Curtis Brundy and Demmy Verbeke as “values-aligned” investing.

As the open science movement evolves, new funding mechanisms are emerging within the research ecosystem—like the Open Book Collective or the European Diamond Capacity Hub. TSOSI can also act as a rearview mirror, allowing us to compare and understand these new mechanisms. This, in turn, could help us shape the future of the open science funding landscape.

References

European Commission: Directorate-General for Research and Innovation and Kramer, B. (2024). Study on scientific publishing in Europe. https://doi.org/10.2777/89349

Lewis, D. W. (2017). The 2,5% Commitment. https://doi.org/10.7912/C2JD29

Schweighofer, B., & Bartlewski, J. (2024). Building an infrastructure for cost data transparency. Katina. https://doi.org/10.1146/katina-121824-1

UNESCO. (2022). Open Science toolkit: Funding Open Science. https://doi.org/10.54677/MGVX2222

Verbeke, D., & Brundy, C. (2024). How open investing will transform library collections. Katina. https://doi.org/10.1146/katina-111024-3