Building a Sustainable Commons: Why community governance is the bedrock of Open Scholarly Infrastructure

The Open Science movement stands at a critical juncture. While the principle of making research outputs "open" is now widely accepted as a prerequisite for progress, the true challenge remains: achieving long-term sustainability for the core infrastructures that make this openness possible. 

This was the central question explored at the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information's recent Working Group 5 session on Sustaining Infrastructures (full session on Youtube). We are grateful to the Barcelona Declaration team for the invitation and for the opportunity to hear how three major open infrastructure initiatives view the world of sustainability, the challenges, and the opportunities. The OpenAIRE Graph, OpenAlex, and OpenCitations each presented their approaches, offering distinct models for balancing openness with operational viability. (The session presentations are also available on Zenodo.)

The "holy grail" we are all pursuing is the creation of operational models that are not only financially viable but also resilient, trusted by the communities they serve, and fundamentally aligned with scholarly values.

In this landscape, we at OpenAIRE have cultivated a unique, community-centric approach to this challenge. We have deliberately structured ourselves to balance the ideals of open scholarship with the practical realities of operational and financial stability.

This analysis expands on our presentation at the BDORI session and explores how OpenAIRE's federated structure, deep community governance, and hybrid funding model provide a robust blueprint for the future of open scholarly communication. By examining these core components, we can understand how to build a truly sustainable commons. 

But to begin, we must first ask: what truly defines the OpenAIRE ecosystem?

OpenAIRE's foundational identity as a non-profit, European organisation is a strategic choice of profound importance. In an environment increasingly populated by commercial data providers, the distinction of being a public e-Infrastructure is critical. This positions OpenAIRE not merely as a service provider, but as a public good, explicitly designed to serve the European research community and safeguard its digital sovereignty.

Its key characteristics are woven together to create a cohesive and mission-driven organisation:

• A Non-Profit Organisation: Formally established in October 2018, OpenAIRE operates as a mission-driven entity, ensuring its goals remain aligned with the public interest rather than shareholder returns.
• A Sovereign European e-Infrastructure: Primarily focused on serving the European research community and ensuring its digital autonomy in a landscape of global commercial providers.
• A European Footprint with Global Outreach: While rooted in Europe, OpenAIRE's mission extends globally, serving the broader international research community and fostering worldwide partnerships.
• Federated Model: OpenAIRE's strength is grounded in a structure that brings together human capital, a distributed network of national experts, and advanced, interoperable ICT services from across Europe.
• Extensive Network: The organisation is comprised of 55 members across 36 countries, built upon a trusted network of National Open Access Desks (NOADs) that has been operational since 2009.

This structure enables a holistic, three-pillared approach to its mission of co-shaping and implementing Open Science. It combines a human Network (connecting people and expertise), extensive Training (building local capacities), and robust Services (implementing practical solutions). This integrated ecosystem demonstrates that sustainable infrastructure is as much about people and policy as it is about technology. The key to ensuring this ecosystem remains aligned with its community's needs lies in how it is governed. 

Community governance is OpenAIRE's core differentiator and the mechanism that protects its status as a public good. For an infrastructure to be truly "open," it must be directed and controlled by its stakeholders. This democratic accountability is the only reliable safeguard against mission drift, ensuring that the infrastructure continues to serve the collective interest rather than narrow or commercial agendas.

OpenAIRE's governance model is a direct reflection of its federated structure. The network of 55+ members and 36 national representatives (the NOADs) creates a powerful system of shared responsibility and distributed decision-making. By coordinating national ecosystems and pooling expertise, this federated approach inherently reduces the duplication of effort and builds a deep-seated foundation of trust among participants.

This model stands in contrast to other approaches in the open information landscape:

• Unlike models where a central, top-down board of directors holds ultimate control, at the risk of becoming disconnected from community needs, OpenAIRE's authority is distributed among its national members. This ensures the infrastructure is responsive to diverse local needs while serving a collective European mission.
• In contrast to structures where community advisory boards may provide valuable input but lack executive power, risking "community-washing" where feedback is heard but not acted upon, OpenAIRE's members are integral to its day-to-day operations and long-term strategic direction. Their role is not merely consultative; it is foundational.

This deeply embedded, participatory system ensures that OpenAIRE remains accountable to the community it serves. This distributed ownership model is not just a philosophical ideal; it is a strategic asset. By embedding responsibility across 36 nations, it diversifies financial risk, builds a broad base for membership co-financing, and presents a unified, powerful case for pan-European public funding.

To ensure long-term survival, a public infrastructure must develop a sophisticated cost-recovery model that can stand the instability of project-based funding cycles. Crucially, this must be achieved without resorting to purely commercial incentives that could compromise its core mission. OpenAIRE has navigated this challenge by implementing a pragmatic, hybrid financial framework designed as a co-investment model for a shared public good.

OpenAIRE's financial needs are driven by the complex and evolving demands of a modern digital infrastructure. Major costs include:

• Continuous operation, maintenance, and evolution of its suite of services.
• Significant and ongoing investment in the AI-ready OpenAIRE Graph, a core strategic asset whose aggregation, curation, and enrichment processes require scaling pipelines for billions of records and substantial computing resources (including GPUs).
• Development and promotion of interoperability standards.
• Community training, capacity building, and feedback loops essential for a user-centric model.
• Maintaining strategic partnerships and integrations, such as with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), to ensure a cohesive European research ecosystem.
• Forging and maintaining global partnerships to ensure a worldwide reach and impact.

TTo meet these costs, OpenAIRE employs a diversified cost-recovery model. This hybrid approach strategically blends different funding streams to create stability. Approximately 50-60% of current funding comes from competitive EU projects, which drive innovation and service evolution. The balance is covered through a co-financing mechanism composed of membership fees from its national nodes (NOADs) and tiered subscriptions for specific, value-added services.

This approach directly confronts the persistent challenges facing open infrastructure, namely the perception that "open is free" and the inherent instability of relying solely on project-based funding. Are we there yet? No. But we are working towards it, and this hybrid model demonstrates both fiscal responsibility and genuine community commitment. However, it cannot single-handedly solve the systemic funding instability common to public digital infrastructure. Securing Europe's knowledge commons for the long term requires a broader, multi-level commitment from all stakeholders.