Empowering sustainable open infrastructure: Welcoming new SCOSS members for 2024/25

Open Access Australasia is pleased to host its annual webinar to showcase the SCOSS pledges for 2024/2025. The SCOSS pledges are crucial for advancing the global sustainability of open science infrastructure by securing voluntary, action-oriented commitments from diverse institutions to collaboratively support open scholarship. OAA endorses the SCOSS project as actioning commitment to shared responsibility and collective investment. By hosting an annual webinar to showcase the year’s SCOSS-backed initiatives, OAA celebrates past progress and impact and raises awareness, inspiring broader participation in sustaining open research. Collective support enables real-world results!

Now in its sixth year, SCOSS is excited to announce the four new Open Science infrastructure partners that will join the SCOSS Family. After careful evaluation, SCOSS has selected the African Journals Online (AJOL), Episciences, Make Data Count and SciPost for this sixth funding cycle. These organisations are seeking help in both creating and maintaining sustainable futures.

“ The chosen projects proposed clear funding targets to address concrete needs and have been subject to rigorous assessment. They are established services with high usage that are making important contributions to open science, but they need community support to innovate, to broaden their global reach, and to increase their long-term financial viability.”

Susan Haigh, Chair of the SCOSS Board

Watch the recording

View the slides:

Open Access Australasia_ SCOSS Round 6 Introduction.pdf

Speakers

Janice Chan

Deputy Director, Research and Systems at Curtin University.

Janice Chan is Deputy Director, Research and Systems at Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia. She provides strategic leadership of a broad range of research services, collections acquisition and discovery, library systems and facilities management, special collections, exhibitions and public programs. In 2025, she joined the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) Board as a member representing the Council of Australasian University Librarians (CAUL).

Rosalie Lack

Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) Coordinator.

Rosalie Lack is the Global Sustainability Coalition for Open Science Services (SCOSS) Coordinator. She is responsible for managing SCOSS family community activities, implementing communications, and contributing to strategic initiatives. She has worked previously with the African Digital Library Support Network (ADLSN), the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), California Digital Library (CDL), and Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL). She has a Master of Information Management and Systems from UC Berkeley School of Information and a Master of Studies in Law from UC Law San Francisco.

Susan Murray

Executive Director of African Journals OnLine

Susan Murray has been the Executive Director of African Journals OnLine (AJOL) since 2010, after serving as its Manager for three years prior, bringing with her an academic background in Development Economics and experience in nonprofit training organizations. She has grown AJOL from a short online list of some African peer-reviewed journals to a large full-text online platform (using Free and Open Source software) of rigorously assessed and supported African research journals. AJOL now provides various services to millions of people within the continent and around the world. Murray is and has been an Advisory Committee Member and Board Director of several regional and global scholarly initiatives, an experienced workshop facilitator, and a frequent conference speaker.

Raphaël Tournoy

Head, Episciences

Raphaël Tournoy is the Head of the Episciences platform, a diamond open-access scientific publishing service operating on the overlay journal model. He oversees its development, integrating services with open repositories to enhance transparency and reproducibility in scientific publishing. Prior to this role, Tournoy contributed to the technical and software infrastructure of the HAL open archive at the Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe (CCSD).

Iratxe Puebla

Director, Make Data Count.

Iratxe Puebla is Director of Make Data Count and drives the initiative’s work to develop tools and practices for the meaningful evaluation of the use of data. Make Data Count leads open infrastructure for tracking and normalizing data usage, and community collaboration to enable evaluation and reward of the reach of open data, for example, through its current partnership with HELIOS Open to advance data evaluation at institutions. Prior to this role, Iratxe worked at ASAPbio, where she led initiatives to promote the use of preprints and transparency in peer review. She also held editorial roles at different open-access journals and served as Deputy Editor-in-Chief at the journal PLOS ONE. Iratxe is a member of the FORCE11 Board of Directors and the OpenCitations Advisory Board.

Jean-Sébastien Caux

Founder, chairman and lead developer of SciPost.

Jean-Sébastien Caux is Professor of Low-Dimensional Quantum Condensed Matter at the University of Amsterdam. After undergraduate studies in Montréal, he moved to Oxford where he obtained his doctorate in 1998. Following a postdoc in Vancouver, he returned to Oxford as Postdoctoral Fellow in All Souls College, finally landing in Amsterdam in 2003. He is the recipient of (among others) the NWO Vici and ERC Advanced grants. Professor Caux is a strong believer in openness in scientific publishing, and is the founder, chairman and lead developer of SciPost, a non-profit foundation providing publishing solutions serving science and scientists and which operates the scipost.org genuine open access publication portal.

Angus Cook

Director, Content Procurement, Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL).

Angus Cook is the Director, Content Procurement at the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL). CAUL is a recognized supporter of SCOSS-backed open science infrastructure, and promoting SCOSS pledges is part of CAUL’s open infrastructure advocacy. Angus has over a decade’s experience working with library vendors, partnering in the supply of information services for STEM, humanities, health and law. His experience also includes consulting and provision of library management systems, digital archive systems, discovery layers, authentication and inter-library loan products.

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