SCOSS Selects ROR as Essential Open Infrastructure

We are thrilled to announce that ROR has been selected by SCOSS as essential open infrastructure and will be highlighted in the latest SCOSS campaign, which kicked off this week.

SCOSS - the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services - is an initiative that focuses on identifying non-commercial infrastructures that are key for open science and worthy of community investment. In order to be selected, applicants must go through a competitive and rigorous evaluation process, and only a few infrastructures are approved every cycle.

It is an honor for ROR to receive this selection, and we are excited that ROR is continuing to be recognized as essential open scholarly infrastructure.

Image credit: @scossfunding on Twitter

With this selection, ROR joins the esteemed company of other community-based open infrastructure initiatives such as LA Referencia and Dryad (both selected for the current cycle), along with past awardees DOAJ, Sherpa Romeo, DOAB, PKP, OpenCitations, arXiv, Redalyc/AmeliCA, and DSpace. ROR also carries the distinction of being the first persistent identifier (PID) to receive SCOSS recognition!

SCOSS’s selection of ROR is another prominent signal of ROR’s growing presence in coordinated infrastructure strategies, such as those described in recent reports by Jisc and the Australian Research Data Commons, and in recommendations outlined by US research data stakeholder groups to implement effective data practices and accelerate public access.

As an early signatory to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, ROR has been committed to carrying out a careful and responsible approach to managing the initiative. We began the process of applying for SCOSS at the same time that we were firming up an overarching sustainability model for ROR that we announced in October and that is based on a shared resourcing commitment by ROR’s three operating organizations California Digital Library, Crossref, and DataCite. We knew that we would need to have a working sustainability framework in place regardless of whether our SCOSS application was successful, and that if the SCOSS application was successful, it would be an opportunity to highlight how our three organizations’ shared commitment can be supplemented by outside investment by community stakeholders.

ROR has always and will always continue to be community-led open infrastructure. Broadening the base of community investment in ROR is one way to ensure that our infrastructure is sustained and secured as a common good for us all.

We are grateful to SCOSS for recognizing ROR as essential open infrastructure, and we look forward to continuing our work to support broad adoption of open persistent identifiers and rich metadata across the research ecosystem.