Knowledge Commons has committed to the adoption of the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure. To that end, we’ve completed an audit to determine the degree to which our operations are in alignment with POSI version 1.1. We will continue to update this information as we make progress toward our goals, as well as to adjust the descriptions of those goals to reflect changes forthcoming in POSI 2.0. –Kathleen

Governance

Coverage across the scholarly enterprise – research transcends disciplines, geography, institutions, and stakeholders. Organisations and the infrastructure they run need to reflect this.

Goal met. KC is discipline-inclusive and its membership lives and works around the world. KC is fiscally hosted by Michigan State University but is of service to any institution, in any geographic location, that wishes to join and support us.

Stakeholder governed – a board-governed organisation drawn from the stakeholder community builds confidence that the organisation will take decisions driven by community consensus and a balance of interests.

Goal partially met. KC’s governance structure includes its Participating Organization Council, which serves as its board; member organizations are entitled to nominate a representative to serve on the Council. The Modern Language Association, by virtue of having founded KC, and Michigan State University, by virtue of serving as its fiscal host, have permanent representation on the Council. The Council may have no more than 11 members total; when we reach more than 11 participating organizations we will move to a structure in which every organization will be represented in a broader member body and will be entitled to nominate and vote for candidates for the Council. KC’s governance structure also includes a User Advisory Group, which advises our team on broad community needs and desires with respect to the platform and its future.

However, because we are hosted and fiscally sponsored by MSU, we are ultimately answerable to MSU’s Board of Trustees, who could theoretically overrule our Council if they disapprove of our actions, even to the extent of determining that our operations should be discontinued. It is highly unlikely that they would do so, but this is a real circumstance that we need to reckon with in the years ahead.

Non-discriminatory participation or membership – we see the best option as an “opt-in” approach with principles of non-discrimination and inclusivity where any stakeholder group may express an interest and should be welcome. Representation in governance must reflect the character of the community or membership.

Goal met. KC welcomes individual members from any geographic, linguistic, disciplinary, and other background; however, MSU is bound by state and federal policies that may restrict our ability to do business with organizations located in sanctioned nations. That said, our values encourage inclusivity and our guidelines for participation expressly prohibit discrimination of any kind.

To that end, from an accessibility standpoint, KC strives to be WCAG 2.1AA compliant. We recently performed an assessment of our platform, which uncovered several issues, and we have published a remediation timetable. We are also working towards a more inclusive approach to supported languages on the platform.

Transparent governance – to achieve trust, the processes and policies for selecting representatives to governance groups should be transparent (within the constraints of privacy laws).

Goal met. KC’s governing documents and processes are available at https://about.hcommons.org/about-us/governance/.

Cannot lobby – infrastructure organisations should not lobby for regulatory change to cement their own positions or narrow self-interest. However, an infrastructure organisation’s role is to support its community, and this can include advocating for policy changes.

Goal met. KC refrains from all self-interested lobbying activities but is actively involved in advocating for policy changes that can help support the work of its community. We do not yet have this restriction on lobbying represented in our governance documents but will include it in a future revision.

Living will – a powerful way to create trust is to publicly describe a plan addressing the conditions under which an organisation or service would be wound down. It should include how this would happen and how any assets could be archived and preserved when passed to a successor organisation or service. Any such organisation or service must adopt POSI and honour the POSI principles.

Goal not yet met. KC does not have a living will, and should begin developing one. Our Bylaws do include, under “Statement of Purpose,” the express indication that the network is committed to “remaining not-for-profit in its orientation” in perpetuity, but we need a clearer statement regarding preservation and succession for the service. Under “Discontinuation of Operations,” we note that such discontinuation may be recommended by the Participating Organization Council, but that Michigan State University as fiscal host has the “sole and exclusive authority to determine, in its discretion, whether network operations should be discontinued.” This is not an entirely comfortable fit, and points to the potential need for KC to become a stand-alone nonprofit in order to ensure that the community, through its governing board, has that “sole and exclusive authority.”

Formal incentives to fulfil mission & wind-down – infrastructures exist for a specific purpose, and that purpose can be radically simplified or even rendered unnecessary by technological or social change. Organisations and services should regularly review community support and the need for their activities. If it is possible, the organisation or service (and staff) should have direct incentives to deliver on the mission and wind down.

Goal partially met. As part of the process of developing a living will, the KC team should likewise consider the conditions under which the right thing to do will be to wind down operations. We will take this on in the months ahead.

Sustainability

Time-limited funds are used only for time-limited activities – operations are supported by sustainable revenue sources – whereas time-limited funds are used only for time-limited activities. Depending on grants to fund ongoing and/or long-term infrastructure operations fully makes them fragile and distracts from building core infrastructure.

Goal partially met. KC is at present largely grant-funded, but is in the process of moving toward a more sustainable funding model that would allow us to restrict time-limited funds to time-limited activities. Our developing revenue model is based on sustaining and participating memberships from institutions of higher education and other groups that want to support our work or make our platform available to their communities. We believe that this model would allow us to achieve sustainability in a normal era – but this is far from a normal era. We also recognize that our reliance on project-based grant support for core operations is also untenable in the present moment. We recognize the fragility that this situation creates and so are opening conversations about other potential sources of support for the project.

Goal to generate surplus – organisations (or services) that define sustainability based merely on recovering costs are brittle and stagnant. It is not enough to merely survive; organisations and services have to be able to adapt and change. To weather economic, social and technological volatility, they need financial resources beyond immediate operating costs.

Goal partially met. Indeed, KC’s sustainability plan includes the goal of producing modest surpluses that will allow us to establish a reserve fund to be accessed for major infrastructural investments, for emergencies, or for project wind-down, in accordance with best practices in nonprofit financial planning. As we have not yet reached break-even, we have a good way to go, but producing a modest surplus in order to weather landscape changes is our goal.

Goal to create financial reserves – a high priority should be having ring-fenced financial reserves, separate from operating funds, that can support implementing living will plans, including a complete, orderly wind down or transition to a successor organisation, or major unexpected events.

Goal partially met. See above.

Mission-consistent revenue generation – revenue sources should be evaluated against the infrastructure’s mission and not run counter to the aims of the organisation or service.

Goal met. KC’s revenue model focuses on investments from institutional and organizational members that wish to sustain the platform and provide its services for their communities. 

Revenue based on services, not data – data related to the running of the scholarly infrastructure should be community property. Appropriate revenue sources might include value-added services, consulting, API Service Level Agreements or membership fees.

Goal met. The data made available through KC are owned by the community; institutional or organizational membership may provide members access to additional APIs for advanced levels of access to those data.

Insurance

Open source – all software and assets required to run the infrastructure should be available under an open-source licence. This does not include other software that may be involved with running the organisation.

Goal partially met. KC makes all of the new software that we develop available on GitHub under the relevant open-source licenses. Some components of our identity management stack are not fully-open source, and some sites on the network currently rely on paid or freemium WordPress plugins. We are working to reduce or eliminate our reliance on such software.

Open data (within constraints of privacy laws) – For an infrastructure to be forked (reproduced), it will be necessary to replicate all relevant data. The [CC0 waiver] (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0) is the best practice in making data openly and legally available. Privacy and data protection laws will limit the extent to which this is possible.

Goal partially met. KC works to document our infrastructure such that it can be replicated by other projects, but we do have some deficiencies that we are working to remediate. Additionally, some portions of the network serving partner organizations may include proprietary content, including logos and wordmarks, that remain the property of our partners and are used with permission.

Available data (within constraints of privacy laws) – it is not enough that the data be “open” if there is no practical way to obtain it. Underlying data should be made easily available via periodic open data dumps.

Goal met. Public-facing KC data is accessible via the web and through APIs, but much of the data we host is owned by its creators and contributors. We make those data available under the terms specified by the authors.

Patent non-assertion – the organisation should commit to a patent non-assertion policy or covenant. The organisation may obtain patents to protect its own operations but not use them to prevent the community from replicating the infrastructure.

Goal not yet met. We have developed language (adapted from Crossref under the CC BY license) that is currently being reviewed by MSU’s general counsel; we will post it when it is finalized.