39 Association of Research Libraries Research Library Issues 302 2021 investment guidance for those looking to adopt, build, and sustain open infrastructure.”13 IOI has also published key findings from the Future of Open Scholarship project to better understand key decision points, costs, and funding models to maintain, sustain, and scale open infrastructure projects.14 Partnership with the Scholarly Community The critical motivation for research libraries to contribute sustainability funding to scholarly infrastructures is that the infrastructures are in use by the research community. Participants in the IMLS-funded “OA in the Open” forum in 2019 indicated that open infrastructure—such as publishing platforms or repositories— was easier to support than open content because infrastructure was viewed as a local priority, used by local constituents. Open content on the other hand (free to all) was harder to justify except as an explicit collective contribution to the commons,15 or what Raym Crow characterizes as altruism.16 Library support for locally used infrastructure can include hosting of institution-led society journals on open platforms (such as the University of Pittsburgh Library System E-Journal Publishing Program17), the development of overlay journals based on preprint services (such as Queen’s University Library’s Advances in Combinatorics18), or the embrace of locally led preprint services themselves (such as the recent acquisition of SocArXiv by the University of Maryland Libraries19). Another way that research libraries contribute to a more sustainable ecosystem of scholarly infrastructure is through teaching and supporting open source or non-proprietary tools, software, and platforms. By training graduate students and faculty in open statistical software packages and the Open Science Framework, for example, or publishing platforms like Omeka and Scalar, libraries contribute to a virtuous circle of open scholarly practices by influencing scholars to adopt such tools. COVID-related shifts to a digital-first environment
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