Commoning Open Infrastructures for Open Science Opening the scientific process for creating knowledge needs opening the access to a number of diverse resources like scientific instruments, scientific data, digital services, software tools, knowledge and expertise, all needed in some form to conduct research. These elements can be regarded as infrastructural resources that are essential inputs to the research process. Making these resources open and shareable require the adoption of standards, the right legal frameworks and license, and clear rules for access. There is also the crucial aspect of defining the appropriate governance and management mechanisms that ensure their long term maintenance and availability. This presentation tackles commoning as the social practice suitable to create systems to manage these shared resources and provides examples in the area of open science. It also identifies some of the current challenges with particular focus on the digital infrastructures.

Modules, libraries, frameworks, and other pieces of code are, by default, free and open source. There’s little reason to keep this kind of code closed. This iteration of startup-land is built on free components. Applications are usually free and rarely open source. In contrast to modules and lower-level code, applications require lots of customer service and typically attract few contributors. Few people volunteer to do customer service, but lots of people volunteer to contribute code. Hence, libraries and modules are more popular as volunteer-based projects. Services are often free at low levels of usage but almost never free at high levels of usage. This is because the price of web servers, transfer, and storage has not decreased significantly when you’re working at scale. Also, high-scale services require devops people - previously, roughly, known as system admins - to keep things running. While this is an enjoyable job for masochists and order muppets, it’s not something that people typically do for free. Hence, services are rarely purely volunteer projects.

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