Scholar Nexus: Open Publishing Infrastructure by a Global Coalition of Research Libraries

Nicholas Robert Halper

Funding Area: Community governance / Gobernanza comunitaria

Problem Statement: Scholar Nexus addresses issues in incentive structures for using open publishing systems for researchers and scientists. Specifically, this open infrastructure provides a technological backbone, a flexible database offering a variety of relationships between scholars, their works, and other types of research outputs. Combined with a set of open and reusable code, this infrastructure makes it easy for others to build scholarly publishing tools, journals, and other services that share a common, open database while allowing each service to serve the needs of their specific community or domain. This infrastructure lowers the barriers to building services that enable others to participate in open scholarly communication and provides an open data repository of scholarly works for others to read, access, reference, or study. To help ensure that this project serves the needs of the global community that uses it, we want to move the project to be governed by a global coalition of research libraries with appropriate representation from libraries in low and middle income economies. Establishing international governance is both logistically and legally complicated. Additionally a common failure mode of open projects in the publishing space is a takeover or acquisition by for-profit publishers. Both of these challenges pose an existential threat to continuing to allow this infrastructure to exist and serve the global community of scholars.

Proposed Activities: We are looking for support for two primary activities: A small amount of website developer time to support the process of making our governance documents open, navigable, and commentable Funds to contract a lawyer to help us create legally sound governance documents that work for a globally governed organization Staff member support to facilitate governance meetings, arrange community advisory committees, and arrange and hold governing board meetings Activity 1: We will work with a developer from our international network of students (some of whom have done development for us in the past). The developer will need to be proficient in basic Javascript, git, and HTML. They will need to be able to publish documentation using Curvenote and MyST markdown (a partner that we work with on the project) so that the documentation is built in an easy to navigate and follow website. We anticipate that this will take 20-30 hours from a junior javascript and web developer. Activity 2: We will need periodic support from a lawyer as the rest of our project evolves and as we move towards a new method of ownership and governance. We need two different lawyers: one familiar with incorporation and bylaw development in the United States and another that can extend this knowledge to specific governance policies for international nonprofits. We expect to engage with these lawyers over the course of two years on a periodic, as needed basis. We anticipate 30-40 hours of work from these experts over the next two years. Activity 3: To help facilitate community-run governance, help recruit and strengthen our governing teams, and integrate community feedback into the governance process, we need partial support of a staff member that can help perform these activities. Support of this staff member will ensure dedicated time to ensuring broad and diverse participation of stakeholders, community members, and officers in facilitating and guiding the organization. While this person is supported heavily by teams of volunteers, we anticipate this role will be about 40-60 hours per year.

Openness: Both the entire organization and infrastructure project as well as the specific community governance documentation have open source code, open documentation, and support open practices (such as rotating, open, community governance). Similarly, the larger project, Scholar Nexus, aims to increase worldwide participation in science by lowering costs and barriers to participation. The governance project itself attempts to allow us to involve a broader community of global scholars in governing the project by giving them true power in determining the strategy and direction of the open infrastructure while ensuring protection against bad actors. We hope that getting legal and professional help in constructing a model for this global governance will enable other organizations to be able to allow global community governance as well. By sharing this governance documentation openly and making it easily reusable, we can support other open infrastructure organizations with robust models of governance for larger projects.

Challenges: There is no challenge to making our documentation open, commentable, or interactable. Instead the challenge lies in the legal ‘watertightness’ of the work. This is why we need professional legal help. Our board of advisors members have demonstrated that it is possible to create such robust governance structures and bylaws for organizations, but suggested that we get this professional insight. Community run governance is a complicated process that goes beyond documentation and processes and runs into building rapport and presence in your community. While we have had success in completing this for other activities in the past, it takes careful attention, and we think this grant will help support the part time staff needed to ensure that continuous attention.

Neglectedness: Getting funding for governance documentation specifically is challenging. Some places discourage use of contractors, others don’t see the importance of governance practices and how essential they are to healthy and community-focused open infrastructure. We have some funds that are allowed for use in general operations though, and are using those to supplement this request for funding.

Success: Success of this work is primarily focused on the project outputs themselves, but the ability to construct these project outputs will also enable us to better hire and construct our actual governing board and members. Thus, success has three components: A set of bylaws that define the organization, its governance, and protect from takeover by bad actors within the governance committee or boards. A public website and open code repository that make these bylaws easily copyable and accessible in both an easy to navigate but also easy to copy format (such as markdown). This website must enable commenting or feedback on governance procedures. A governing board made up of international scholars or librarians with plans for periodic changes or rotations in governance, and how governing board decisions are documented for open viewing.

Total Budget: 15,000

Affiliations: Neuromatch, Inc. and Scholar Nexus, LLC

LMIE Carveout: Our project serves the global community of scholars and does not cater towards one specific demographic or another. We do not make services that specifically target any region or group. That said, the current userbase of Neuromatch, Inc. services (such as our open education projects) is 52% from low and middle income countries (currently active in 126+ countries).

Team Skills: Our team runs the largest open, online, live teaching, higher education platform in the world (to our knowledge). We have demonstrated both an ability to build deep, close, community bonds in open science projects, helping to instill the values of open science within the context of discipline specific learning in science. In this project, we have been able to demonstrate the value of community lead governance, placing our students, teachers, and scientific leaders together on boards and advisory committees that influence the direction and structure of our organization. Combined with strong loops for community feedback, I think our team has demonstrated, through our previous work, that there are creative and impactful methods to community based governance. In addition to these core skills, individual team members bring experience in managing university libraries (team members from MIT libraries and University College London), experience setting publishing policy for large funders (Open Publishing Lead at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), and experience creating open, sustainable, and usable software for knowledge sharing (CEO of Digital Scholar and Zotero). We think this combination of experience, team capabilities, and international representation are a strong mix to support the success of this project.

How Did You Hear About This Call: Word of mouth (e.g. conversations and emails from IOI staff, friends, colleagues, etc.) / Boca a boca (por ejemplo, conversaciones y correos electrónicos del personal del IOI, amigos, colegas, etc.)

TLDR: Building governance documents for open publishing infrastructure governed by a global community of research libraries

Submission Number: 3