Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
An INVENIO-based repository publishing its hosting region and that region's grid carbon intensity as part of its POSI-aligned transparency reporting.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A closed, commercially-operated publishing platform's own data-centre PUE disclosure — a corporate sustainability report, not community-governed open-infrastructure disclosure.
Editorial commentary
As open scholarly infrastructure (OSI) takes responsibility for an increasing share of research-output preservation and discovery, its carbon footprint becomes a community concern. Examples include CrossRef, DataCite, ORCID, OpenAIRE, INVENIO-based repositories, and arXiv, each of which discloses or is being asked to disclose hosting energy, region, and grid intensity. Efficient design (caching, deduplication, lazy preservation tiers) is increasingly considered alongside scientific feature requirements. The POSI principles (Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure) implicitly support this conversation.
Scope: what this page is, and is not, about
This page is specifically about the operational energy and carbon footprint of the shared, community-governed services that scholarly communication runs on — identifier registries, metadata APIs, preservation systems. It is distinct from sustainable HPC (the facility-level design and procurement decisions behind a research computing centre) and from energy proportionality (the general hardware/software property that any computing system, including this infrastructure’s own servers, can be designed to have). A single researcher’s own compute job is covered under compute carbon footprint, not here.
Worked example
An INVENIO-based repository disclosing its hosting region and the grid carbon intensity of that region in its transparency reporting, consistent with the accountability strand of POSI, is a concrete instance of open-infrastructure energy disclosure — the kind of disclosure funders and Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) increasingly ask community-governed services to publish.
Counter-example
A commercially-operated, closed publishing platform disclosing its own data-centre PUE is a corporate sustainability disclosure, not an instance of this concept — the defining feature here is community governance (per POSI) combined with the disclosure, not the disclosure alone.
Related pages
See also compute carbon footprint, sustainable HPC, energy proportionality, green software engineering, and the EOSC Federation.
References
- Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), openscholarlyinfrastructure.org.
- Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) annual reports (investinopen.org).
Also known as
OSI energy efficiency · Repository carbon footprint
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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