Everything we have gained by opening content and data will be under threat if we allow the enclosure of scholarly infrastructures. We propose a set of principles by which Open Infrastructures to support the research community could be run and sustained.

The play Arcadia by Tom Stoppard‘s links entropy and chaos theory, the history of english landscape gardens, romantic literature and idiocies of academia.

There’s an argument I often hear that brings me up short. Not so much short because I don’t have an answer but because I haven’t managed to wrap my head around where it comes from.

For my holiday project I’m reading through my old blog posts and trying to track the conversations that they were part of. What is shocking, but not surprising with a little thought, is how many of my current ideas seem to spring into being almost whole in single posts. And just how old some of those posts are. At the some time there is plenty of misunderstanding and rank naivety in there as well.

Many efforts at building data infrastructures for the “average researcher” have been funded, designed and in some cases even built. Most of them have limited success. Part of the problem has always been building systems that solve problems that the “average researcher” doesn’t know that they have.

I am currently on holiday. You can tell this because I’m writing, reading and otherwise doing things that I regard as fun. In particular I’ve been catching up on some reading. I’ve been meaning to read Danah Boyd‘s It’s Complicated  for some time (and you can see some of my first impressions in the previous post) but I had held off because I wanted to buy a copy. That may seem a strange statement.

I have a distinct tendency to see everything through the lens of what it means for research communities. I have just finally read Danah Boyd’s It’s Complicated  a book that focuses on how and why U.S. teenagers interact with and through social media.

It takes me a while to process things. It often then takes me longer to feel able to write about them. Two weeks ago we lost one of the true giants of Open Science. Others have written about Jean-Claude’s work and his contributions – and I don’t feel able to add much to those reflections at the moment.

Over the past few weeks there has been a sudden increase in the amount of financial data on scholarly communications in the public domain. This was triggered in large part by the Wellcome Trust releasing data on the prices paid for Article Processing Charges by the institutions it funds.

One of the things that has been bothering me for some time is the question of finding the right governance and finance models for supporting both a core set of scholarly communications infrastructures and shared innovation spaces. In this post I wanted to think about how we bridge the funding gap from promising pilot to community infrastructure and how debt financing might play a role.