The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) is a network of influential organizations committed to securing open access and open science infrastructures for the future. It has accepted Episciences’ application, providing it with a framework and global visibility among open science stakeholders to raise financial support in a crowd-funding type approach.
Choosing the Path of Crowdfunding
The CCSD’s aim in submitting a funding request for Episciences is to strengthen the platform so that it can support new journals and continue to develop innovative tools based on open infrastructures.
SCOSS offers a framework and financing structure designed to gather voluntary contributions from institutions. For example, the idea is to encourage university libraries to allocate a portion of their financial resources to infrastructures like Episciences, instead of subscription fees or APCs (Article Processing Charges).
What is Episciences’ Business Model?
Episciences does not provide direct financial support to journals. Instead, it offers them human resources for technical support and editorial guidance. Since its inception, Inria and the Institut Fourier have been partners, providing specific support for the editorial assistance of journals within their thematic communities.
The current funding for Episciences comes from CCSD’s governing bodies (CNRS, Inria, INRAE). Its material infrastructure is shared with the two other platforms, HAL and Sciencesconf.
Project-based funding is an essential way to increase the budget, enabling the recruitment of contractors and the purchase of services—primarily for software development to date. For instance, two recently launched projects, nepHAL+ and Édisciences, are winners of the latest call for projects by the French National Open Science Fund (FNSO).
Opening up the funding of the Episciences infrastructure to both national and international institutions represents an innovative approach for the CCSD.
Episciences is already listed by the Couperin consortium in its 2024 campaign to support initiatives promoting open science. The consortium handles the collection of contributions from member institutions and redistributes the collected funds to the infrastructures.
SCOSS Criteria
SCOSS provides the funding framework and structure, selecting candidate infrastructures based on a defined set of criteria. Each candidate infrastructure must meet at least the following four conditions:
- Have existed for at least two years and demonstrate its commitment to sustainable management. Eligible costs for SCOSS support may include operational expenses or innovations aimed at making the infrastructure more technically or financially sustainable.
- Have nonprofit status in the country where it is based and/or be affiliated with a research or educational institution.
- The services or infrastructure provided by the candidate organization must have international or multinational scope.
- These services must be broadly relevant to more than one research discipline.
Infrastructures that successfully pass this evaluation are presented to the global open science community in the form of a crowdfunding appeal. Over 300 institutions have already contributed financially to various campaigns.
The Episciences Programme
The support of Episciences by SCOSS will make it possible to
- improve the publishing platform and the services offered to the scientific communities,
- welcome new journals and broaden thematic coverage by opening up to new disciplines,
- improve production tools, for example by offering new publication formats,
- support new repositories,
- create a network of ambassadors to promote the overlay model and the platform.
Episciences is grateful for the support of SCOSS and the opportunity to work with the SCOSS funders. The institutions contributing financially will thus be supporting an innovative Diamond publishing model initiated and supported by the scientific community.