Part of the Oxford Forum of Open Scholarship 2025

Open Knowledge Infrastructure

Trends in open science and scholarly communication require to think differently about infrastructure in the 21st century. On top of operating buildings, laboratories, libraries and other forms of scientific infrastructure, research institutions need to accommodate for a globally networked system for knowledge sharing. This “Open knowledge infrastructure” goes far beyond IT-Systems and involves digital preservation, intellectual data curation, analytics, software development and the operation and control of artificial intelligence. As the roles of researchers and infrastructure providers increasingly merge, a mere material and technological perspective on digital infrastructure is obsolete and needs to be replaced with a peoples’ perspective.