Strengthening Collective Models for Institutional Research Infrastructure

Hello, I am Maria Gould and I lead community programs and product strategy at DataCite. I'm here today to talk about strengthening collective funding models for institutional research infrastructure. I'll be exploring this topic through the prism of DataCite and talking about recent developments in DataCite's membership model, using this perspective to refract broader insights about community-owned infrastructure in general. The guiding question for this talk is about what we can gain by recognizing research infrastructure as a collective investment rather than as a single transaction or a service to be purchased. In this presentation, I'll go through three sections. The first will provide a general introduction or reintroduction to DataCite and the work that we do. In the second part, I'll focus on DataCite's recent membership model transition as an example of a broader shift underway to re-center collective funding models for shared infrastructure. And the third and final part will offer some perspectives on the broader implications of DataCite's experience and some considerations for community input and action. So, a brief overview of DataCite. We are a non-profit membership association established in 2009 by an international group of research organizations who were interested in forming a community and developing shared open infrastructure to make their research outputs and activities more visible and citable. And this premise of DataCite as a community and DataCite as a foundational and inclusive infrastructure provider still guides our work to this day. Today, we have a global membership community of more than 1,800 research organizations around the world including libraries, repositories, research facilities, government agencies, museums, and more. And we are governed by those members. And these members join DataCite to use our infrastructure and services to make the research outputs and activities that they support more visible and discoverable. Not just traditional traditional outputs such as journal articles and text publications, but also datasets as info evidenced by our name and other types of resources. And the primary infrastructure that we support consists of DOI registration access for all of these outputs and related tools and services that make it possible for the reser- resources that have DOIs to be found and reused and persistently available for the long term. All of the metadata that DataCite members make available is part of a large open data source of research information that can be retrieved and harvested by downstream indexes and systems. Now, DataCite has always operated on a membership model and this model has evolved over the years as the organization and the community around it have evolved. But it was and and still is constructed on a few primary components. That we have multiple pathways and access points for organizations to participate. Most recently, this means being able to join as an individual institution or through a consortium, that we operate on a member-based governance model, and that we have annual fees for membership and services that support cost recovery and long-term sustainability of our infrastructure and operations. The membership model has served DataCite and the community well, and we've always had active involvement in in shaping it. And most recently, as DataCite and the community around it have continued to grow, we began paying attention to some signs pointing to fundamental challenges and disconnects that we wanted to address. One challenge was disincentives to adoption. We had a pricing model based on DOI volume, going against the goal of supporting institutions in registering DOIs for all of their outputs and activities. We identified some barriers to access because we had a standard fee structure without any differentiation for socioeconomic contexts. We identified challenges with administrative overhead, partly due to the volume-based pricing I mentioned before, making it difficult for institutions to budget and predict costs over multiple years, also inhibiting their decision-making. And fundamentally, the challenge here was a bit of a strategic misalignment in that we had a membership model and associated fee structure that privileged or put the emphasis on individual shorter-term transactions over the ambition of long-lasting collective investment in shared infrastructure. So, we analyzed these challenges and carried out a number of consultations with our community within and beyond our membership and at the beginning of this year decided that it was an important time to make some key changes. In April of this year, we rolled out an updated membership model that took those challenges and community insights into account. We retained the existing membership pathways that we already had, allowing institutions to join DataCite independently or through a consortium depending on their needs. And we made critical adjustments to the associated pricing model previously associated with DOI registrations, shifting this to a shared open infrastructure fee and removing specific pricing tiers tied to DOI registration volumes. We also introduced a scaled fee model that accounted for different economic circumstances at the country level. And this shift crucially put DataCite in a position to directly address those challenges that we had identified with the prior model. So, now that we have removed the pricing tiers based on DOI registration volumes, we are able to incentivize usage and help our members realize the promise of registering DOIs for all of the outputs and activities that they support without having to artificially restrict what they register a DOI for because they don't want to be bumped into the next pricing tier. We are able to broaden participation through the scaled pricing model for different countries, making it possible to reach an even more global audience and lower barriers to entry, whether they're joining as an individual institution or through a consortium in their region. We're able to reduce volatility and support greater predictability for institutions looking at multi-year long-term costs by making it possible for them to understand year-on-year what they can spend to invest in DataCite infrastructure. And ultimately, we are able to realign the membership fee structure with DataCite's overarching purpose as a mission-driven organization providing long-term collective infrastructure. And this is really the key point that we were hoping to achieve with this transition is realigning the membership model with the guiding vision and values that have always driven DataCite's work and the community around it. Centering DataCite as shared open infrastructure for the global research community and all of the research outputs that they are responsible for stewarding. Centering members as key stakeholders in this infrastructure, not customers, not just users. And centering and enhancing the incentives that organizations have to truly participate and benefit, whether that's registering more DOIs for their resources and activities or participating more actively in our global community of practice. So, now that we've reviewed the specific shift that DataCite made this year, I would like to broaden the lens to view this transition in context and consider why this matters for the research community on a larger scale. Our work at DataCite and with the organizations that we support is playing out in a crucial moment for these institutions and the services that they rely on. This is a moment when institutions are operating under extreme financial pressures and constraints that force difficult decisions and trade-offs. It's a moment when in the world of scholarly communication, we're seeing more consolidation of vendors and services that can lead to enclosure and lock-in, such as commercial publishers asserting ownership over downstream discovery and analytics tools capturing a fuller spectrum of inputs and outputs. And it's a moment of ecosystem fragility where we're seeing the resilience and longevity of even long-standing research infrastructures become vulnerable to underfunding or policy shifts and other risks and threats. These types of developments are not necessarily new or novel, but they are becoming increasingly complex and intertwined in today's context. So, this means that it's an important time to think about what kinds of models for institutional research infrastructure might be most resilient in the face of pressures like these. This transition that we made at DataCite is happening in this broader context and as part of a broader conversation about why infrastructure matters, about what infrastructure models are most needed for institutions that are looking to invest in different kinds of research activities, and about how and why these infrastructure services should be resourced or could be realigned with institutional realities and priorities. And all of this is in consideration of the specific vulnerabilities and complexities of the present moment, but also in terms of what's needed for perpetuity. There are a lot of voices speaking up about this topic that we can be listening to. I've shared a few examples of some recent articles and conversations on the slide here. I don't intend to speak for these authors or exclude others not noted here, but the point is that there is community momentum about what kinds of shifts should be considered to make it more possible to align the values and ideals and objectives of the research community with the infrastructure and services that they depend on year after year. As these conversations continue, institutions will continue to face challenging choices and circumstances when it comes to the types of services that they choose to adopt. I don't intend to imply that disengaging or disinventing disinvesting in transactionally oriented services will be easy or immediate, but I do want to suggest that there are some straightforward mindset shifts that can be applied when we think through these situations. We can think about stewarding a shared investment, not procuring a service. We can think about contributing to a collective effort, not receiving a service or a benefit. We can think about enabling long-term sovereignty and resilience, not buying short-term access. So, returning to the opening question now to bring things to a close, in addition to thinking about what might be gained by recognizing infrastructure as a collective investment, it's also urgent to think about what might be lost if we don't. If we care about long-lasting, reliable, open infrastructure, we need to recognize that these infrastructures are not inevitable and are not self-sustaining. They depend on the communities recognizing their value and choosing to sustain them. And in order to do this, we need to recognize that these infrastructures are not just a service to purchase, but rather part of a common ecosystem that we all belong to and that we can strengthen through belonging in it together. And on that note, I would like to thank you very much for your attention and interest, and I invite you to reach out at any time with any questions or comments.