One year after joining the SCOSS (Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services) family, the Episciences team presents a review of the platform’s participation in the network’s activities.
Episciences has reaped three benefits from its involvement in this international network: increased international visibility, active participation in a community of practice within the open science ecosystem, and consolidated institutional support.
Visibility among international funders
The SCOSS coalition brings together organisations committed to supporting the development of a free and open ecosystem for open science. Its board of directors and network include consortia and institutions from all regions of the world. Each year, it opens a new funding cycle by selecting up to four infrastructures, which it supports in consolidating their financial base for three years by facilitating connections with funders.
In this context, a funding target is set for each initiative according to its needs, and funders can contribute to it according to a fixed tiering system. Episciences is part of the sixth funding cycle, alongside AJOL, Make Data Count, and SciPost, which began in 2025.
Exchange of practices and strengthening interoperability
This year has been punctuated by regular thematic meetings organised by SCOSS. Opportunities for discussion between the four infrastructures in the current funding cycle and moments of sharing with the nineteen initiatives supported by the program since its launch have enabled the development of a community of practice, verification of the alignment of values, and promotion of opportunities for collaboration between network members.
The functioning of the Episciences model—overlay and Diamond—involves constitutive links with other infrastructures in the open science ecosystem, particularly the SCOSS family. For example:
- more than half of its publications are hosted on arXiv,
- journals are listed in the DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals),
- the platform uses the OpenCitations API to retrieve citations from its publications,
- Episciences encourages editorial committees to publish citation data and export it to Crossref,
- authors are encouraged to declare the software associated with their publications via Software Heritage, with whom Episciences shares data on publications that reference software archived by their service,
- the platform encourages the addition of ROR Research Organization Registry) identifiers to publications to complete the metadata.
Financial support from 21 institutions and 5 consortia
Participation in the funding cycle strengthens the “institutional support” pillar of Episciences’ funding model. The Diamond model, which offers a publication service free of charge to authors and readers, requires diversification of support for the platform and a commitment from institutions to the infrastructure. By redirecting part of their funding dedicated to scientific publication and dissemination, research institutions can contribute to maintaining a public good that is accessible to all researchers.
During this first year of fundraising, 22 institutions and 5 consortia supported Episciences, enabling it to reach 20% of its financial target for the three years of participation in the SCOSS cycle.
Progress of the work program during the three years of funding
The financial support has enabled Episciences to strengthen its team by creating a position for an international platform development manager, in order to achieve the objectives set out in the application. Here is an overview of the progress made on each of the points included in the three-year program:
- Improving the publication platform and services offered to scientific communities: new features have been added to the website, making it easy to create links between publications and software hosted in Software Heritage.
- Welcoming new journals and broadening thematic coverage by opening up to new disciplines: six new journals have already joined Episciences since the beginning of 2025.
- Improving production tools, for example by offering new publication formats: given the current funding level, the resources needed to develop these tools cannot yet be secured. This issue will be explored over the next two years, provided that the funding targets can be met.
- Integrating new repositories: the connection with the ARCHE repository at the Austrian Center for Digital Humanities has been established.
- Contributing to promoting the overlay model and the platform: Episciences’ team is working on the creation of an ambassador program and has participated in several international events, through poster presentations or participation in round tables, and presentation of the platform during three international webinars with library consortia and associations. For example: the Open Repositories conference or the final conference of the CRAFT OA project.
The annual Liber conference
The OS Fair
The final conference of the CRAFT OA project
The symposium “Scientific Literature in Health and Open Science” organized by Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar
The selection of Episciences as an essential infrastructure by SCOSS confirms its commitment to an open science ecosystem centered on the scientific community. The funding target for Episciences in this context is set at €397,250.