41 Association of Research Libraries Research Library Issues 302 2021 address the imbalance of community overreliance on particular resources, with community underinvestment in their sustainability. SCOSS functions as a global crowdfunding call for vetted services. Open access and open science infrastructure providers apply for consideration and are evaluated by an expert advisory panel appointed by the SCOSS Board. If selected, SCOSS works with the provider to establish a three-year funding target meant to transition the service to stable funding. Then SCOSS leverages the participation of key organizations—primarily national consortia—to promote the funding call in their respective regions. SCOSS also strongly encourages the community governance of these structures.23 SCOSS thus functions as a partnership among scholarly infrastructure providers, national funding agencies, and libraries by identifying worthy services that researchers use, and marshalling national funding and individual or consortial research library funding to transition these services to sustainable financial footing.24 In a 2021 survey of SCOSS-contributing institutions, the top reason for contributing funds to a service was that people in their institutions were using it.25 The second reason cited for support was that national consortia had both promoted the service and handled the administrative work of invoicing on behalf of their member libraries, another burdensome aspect of supporting the nascent open ecosystem. Perhaps due to the absence of a central licensing consortium in the United States, the US has lagged behind the rest of the world in contributing to SCOSS funding, despite demonstrable use of the services.26 This is an area requiring further advocacy and visibility to remedy. Conclusion SCOSS, OACIP, the SCIP census, and IOI are all promising initiatives to address the library community’s need for data, criteria, and transparency that would enable the operationalization of maintenance
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