Ed Pentz on building open scholarly infrastructure: A journey of collaboration and diplomacy

November 2024

Ed Pentz on building open scholarly infrastructure: A journey of collaboration and diplomacy

This article expands on Ed Pentz’s Miles Conrad Award lecture at NISO Plus 2024. Drawing on three decades in scholarly publishing — including 24 years as Crossref’s Executive Director — it explores the collaboration, diplomacy, and key inflection points that shaped open scholarly infrastructure, and reflects on the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Strategists

Understand why collaboration and diplomacy are the foundation of open infrastructure. How inflection points create windows for change — and why patience, trust-building, and non-profit governance are what make those changes stick.

Decision-makers

Learn the principles behind Crossref’s founding and longevity. Why collective action, mission-aligned sustainability, and the right governance model matter more than technology alone — with hard-won lessons from 24 years of building open infrastructure.

Practitioners

Trace the technical and organisational milestones from DOI-X to open metadata. From the first cross-publisher reference linking experiments to POSI, ROR, and fully open metadata for 160 million research outputs.

What this paper covers

  • Inflection points — the moments that catalysed major change: the World Wide Web, DOI-X, open access, and more
  • The founding of Crossref — why collective action, not technology alone, was the solution to cross-publisher reference linking
  • Key lessons — focus on the problem, build trust, develop a sustainability model, and be prepared to compromise
  • Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) — why governance and sustainability matter as much as technical standards
  • Diversity, equity, and inclusion — how these principles have shaped Crossref’s culture and the future of open infrastructure
  • Future challenges — AI, metadata quality, and the evolving landscape of scholarly communication

Read the full paper

Loading…

Authors

Download

Download PDF
Format
PDF
Published
1 November 2024

Cite as

Pentz, E. (2024). Building open scholarly infrastructure: A journey of collaboration and diplomacy. Information Services and Use, 44(4), 285–290. https://doi.org/10.1177/18758789241296761

Page maintainer: Ed Pentz
Last updated: 2024-November-01