As defined in the UNESCO: –

Open science infrastructures refer to shared research infrastructures that are needed to support open science and serve the needs of different communities.  These infrastructures may be virtual or physical.

The Oxford definition states that infrastructure comprises the “basic physical and organizational structures and facilities needed for the operation of a society or enterprise.”

In an Open Science context, “infrastructure” — the “structures and facilities” — refers to the scholarly communication resources and services, including software, that we depend upon to enable the scientific and scholarly community to collect, store, organise, access, share, and assess research.

Open science infrastructures are often built by communities and not for profit, which ensures long-term sustainability. Examples of community-based open science infrastructures include unique persistent identifiers such as ORCID and DOI, preprint servers such as arXiv, and open data repositories such as Dspace. By using community-based infrastructures, publishers like us can increase transparency, equity, and fairness to better serve the interests of the academic community and the public.