The Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) is a coalition, formed in 2017, that identifies non-commercial open-science and open-access infrastructure at risk of losing funding, and helps organize collective, multi-year financial support to keep it running. It does not itself operate a grant program or hold funds — it acts as a facilitator and evaluator, connecting vetted infrastructure services with libraries, consortia, funders, and research institutions willing to contribute. This guide covers what SCOSS is, how its funding model actually works, how it decides which services to endorse, and why sustainable funding for shared open-science infrastructure is a real, recurring concern for research administrators rather than a niche library-funding issue.
What Is SCOSS?
SCOSS was established in 2017 to address a structural problem in scholarly communication: many of the free, non-commercial services that open science depends on — preprint servers, data repositories, persistent-identifier registries, citation databases — are built and maintained by small nonprofit or academic-led teams with no reliable, ongoing revenue model. Unlike commercial platforms, they cannot charge subscription fees without undermining the openness that makes them useful in the first place, yet unlike a single institution’s own repository, no single organization is obviously responsible for keeping them funded. SCOSS’s role is to identify which of these services are both critical to the research community and financially at risk, and to organize a coordinated, cost-shared response involving the many institutions that rely on them. Current partner organizations supporting SCOSS include library and open-access bodies such as SPARC Europe, EIFL, LIBER, the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), the Australasian Open Access Strategy Group (AOASG), and the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL), among others (see scoss.org for the current governance and partner list).
Why Open-Science Infrastructure Needs a Coordinated Funder
Open-science infrastructure has a classic public-goods funding problem: every institution benefits from services like a preprint server or a persistent-identifier registry, but no individual institution has a strong individual incentive to fund them, since the service stays freely available to non-payers too. Left alone, this tends toward under-investment — each institution reasonably assumes someone else will cover the cost — even though the collective cost of losing a widely-used service (migration disruption, lost persistent links, lost community trust) is far higher than the cost of sustaining it. This is the same collective-action logic behind national library consortia that negotiate publisher agreements together rather than separately, and behind cost-sharing models like SCOAP3 for particle-physics publishing. SCOSS applies the same logic to infrastructure rather than journal subscriptions: it turns an individually low-priority line item into a coordinated ask that institutions can justify funding because they can see other institutions committing alongside them.
The Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) articulate a closely related concern from the infrastructure-provider side — governance, sustainability, and insurance against mission drift — and many of the services SCOSS evaluates and funds are also POSI-aligned or POSI-adopting organizations. The two initiatives are complementary rather than competing: POSI sets out what durable, community-governed open infrastructure should look like structurally, while SCOSS works on the funding side of making that durability actually possible.
How SCOSS’s Funding Model Works
SCOSS does not collect, hold, or disburse funds itself. Its model works in stages:
- Selection: SCOSS runs a structured application and evaluation process (described below) to identify a small cohort of services for each funding cycle.
- Campaign: Selected services run a defined-length crowdfunding-style pledge campaign, typically framed around a specific annual or multi-year budget target, with SCOSS providing visibility, advocacy, and a shared campaign framework rather than the money itself.
- Pledging: Universities, library consortia, national funding bodies, and other research organizations pledge financial contributions directly to the service, usually as multi-year commitments rather than one-off gifts, which gives the recipient service planning stability rather than a single unpredictable windfall.
- Reporting: Funded services report back on how the money was used and on progress against their sustainability plans, which feeds into SCOSS’s ongoing recommendations.
Because SCOSS acts as a facilitator rather than a fund holder, an institution’s actual payment relationship is with the infrastructure service itself (or its host organization), not with SCOSS as an intermediary. SCOSS’s own reporting states that, since its founding in 2017, it has helped mobilize several million euros in funding across roughly two dozen infrastructure services, with several hundred institutions having contributed at least once — readers should treat the exact current totals as a moving target and check scoss.org directly for up-to-date figures, since campaigns close and new ones open on an ongoing basis.
How SCOSS Evaluates and Endorses a Service
Not every worthy open-source or nonprofit tool that requests support gets a SCOSS campaign. Services apply and go through a review process that SCOSS describes as covering, among other criteria: the service’s demonstrated value and adoption within the research community, its governance structure (who controls it and how decisions get made), its technical solution and openness of its underlying code and data, its current cost structure and funding gap, and the credibility of its longer-term sustainability plan once initial pledged funding runs out. This evaluation is meant to filter for services that are both genuinely essential and structurally capable of using coordinated funding well — not simply the services with the most visible funding shortfall.
Services SCOSS Has Supported
The set of services SCOSS has funded or is currently campaigning for changes over time as campaigns close and new ones launch, so any fixed list will drift out of date. As of SCOSS’s own published materials, services that have been part of what SCOSS calls its “family” of endorsed infrastructures include widely used names in scholarly communication such as arXiv, the Dryad data repository, DSpace, LA Referencia, OpenCitations, Redalyc/AmeliCA, and the Research Organization Registry (ROR). Because this list is actively maintained and updated by SCOSS itself, research administrators evaluating whether to direct institutional funds toward a specific service should confirm current status directly on scoss.org rather than relying on any single third-party summary, including this one.
Why This Matters for Research Administrators
For a research office or library, SCOSS is relevant in a few concrete ways:
- Budget justification: A SCOSS-endorsed campaign gives an institution a vetted, third-party-evaluated case for allocating discretionary or consortial budget toward infrastructure it already relies on — useful when justifying a line item to leadership that isn’t a traditional subscription or membership fee.
- Risk management: Institutions that depend operationally on a free service (for deposit, discovery, identifier resolution, or persistent linking) carry a quiet continuity risk if that service is underfunded. Contributing to its sustainability, or at minimum tracking whether it participates in SCOSS or similar sustainability initiatives, is a legitimate part of vendor/service risk assessment even when no invoice is involved.
- Alignment with open-access and FAIR commitments: Institutions with formal open-access mandates or diamond open-access commitments often rely on non-commercial infrastructure to actually deliver on those commitments; funding that infrastructure’s sustainability is a practical extension of the same policy commitment, not a separate ask.
- Distinguishing from subscription costs: Unlike APCs or transformative agreements, SCOSS pledges are voluntary, multi-year, and not tied to a specific transaction or output — they function more like a membership contribution to shared infrastructure than a purchase, which changes how they should be budgeted and approved internally.
SCOSS and Related Open-Infrastructure Initiatives
SCOSS sits alongside, and is sometimes confused with, a few adjacent efforts that address related but distinct problems. POSI defines what durable, community-governed infrastructure should structurally look like, rather than funding it directly. Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) focuses on research, tools, and guidance to help funders and institutions make better-informed infrastructure investment decisions, complementing rather than duplicating SCOSS’s funding-facilitation role. National and regional library consortia such as Couperin, FinELib, and Projekt DEAL negotiate publisher agreements collectively using a similar cost-sharing logic, but for subscription and publishing costs rather than infrastructure sustainability. Research administrators evaluating institutional participation in open-science infrastructure funding will typically encounter several of these initiatives together rather than in isolation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is SCOSS a grant-making body?
No. SCOSS does not hold or distribute funds itself. It evaluates and endorses services, then facilitates a coordinated pledge campaign; the actual financial commitment is made directly by the contributing institution to the service being funded.
Can an individual university or library contribute directly?
Yes. SCOSS campaigns are open to universities, library consortia, funders, and other research organizations, not only to large national bodies. Details on how to pledge to a specific active campaign are published on scoss.org.
How is SCOSS different from a service simply asking for donations on its own website?
SCOSS adds independent evaluation (of governance, sustainability planning, and community value), coordinated campaign timing, and visibility across many institutions at once, which is intended to produce more predictable, multi-year commitments than an individual service’s own ad hoc fundraising typically achieves.
Does SCOSS fund commercial platforms?
SCOSS’s stated focus is on non-commercial, community-oriented open-science services, consistent with the broader concern that essential infrastructure not be structurally dependent on for-profit ownership. Confirm current eligibility criteria on scoss.org, since program scope can evolve.
