35 Association of Research Libraries Research Library Issues 302 2021 articulate selection criteria for investment. The success of these projects is crucial to the sustainable scholarship endeavor. In 2019, a national forum funded by the US Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), “OA in the Open,” focused on the information decision-makers needed to acquire—and under what conditions they would prioritize—open content or services. Forum participants from small and very large libraries alike found the landscape confusing with: too many projects (some of which are very similar to each other) and too many different models and no clear way to determine worthy projects or initiatives. Librarians at large universities, even those with dedicated scholarly communication librarians, were as likely to cite being overwhelmed and under-informed as were those from smaller institutions.4 In addition to selection criteria for content and infrastructure, participants expressed desire for an information clearinghouse (like a digital platform) in order to determine where peer institutions were contributing. Also in 2019, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation–funded report Mapping the Scholarly Communication Landscape addressed the complexity and opaqueness of the open scholarly infrastructure environment by creating an instrument for collecting data about scholarly communication infrastructure providers (SCIP) for a proposed regular census. In 2020, the project produced case studies of several participating infrastructures, as well as a composite data set of more than 100 scholarly communication resource providers.5 Data from this project can be used to understand the landscape of open and community-based scholarly infrastructure providers with respect to their “forms, functions, structures, and models,” as well as their financial stability. In the meantime, SCOSS, the Global Coalition for Sustainability in Open Science Services, discussed later in this paper, has been functioning as a highly effective international crowdfunding broker, doing outreach and fundraising with libraries and consortia for
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