Key Groups

This list of organizations (in some cases better known as products and/or services than as organizations) is not exhaustive. It does not, notably, include the many universities and libraries creating and adopting open policies and collaborating on efforts to improve the future of open for the researchers at their institutions, or the many organizations advocating for more research spending, more transparency in research, more collaboration, and so on. These efforts are all important and all related to open scholarship.

• 1Science: A Montreal-based company specializing in open access research and OA solutions analysis and development.
• arXiv: The world’s largest and most successful pre-print server, containing a large collection of open articles from physics, astronomy, and other disciplines. Operated by Cornell University.
• American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS): An international non-profit organization, AAAS is the world’s largest multidisciplinary scientific society and a leading publisher, dedicated to advancing science for the benefit of all people.
• Association of Research Libraries (ARL): A network of American university and research libraries, and a long-time global leader in OA advocacy and open solutions development.
• Australasian Open Access Strategy Group (AOASG): A pioneer and leading voice in open science, working to advocate, collaborate, raise awareness, and build capacity for OA in Australia and New Zealand.
• bioRxiv: A recent addition to the pre-print server universe and building off the success of arXiv, bioRxiv primarily serves the life sciences community. Operated by Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory.
• California Digital Library (CDL): Serving the University of California system, CDL is at the forefront of innovative and collaborative approaches to improve open for the UC system and beyond.
• Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL): CARL serves Canada’s research ecosystem and has been a leader in the development and implementation of forward-thinking open policies.
• Center for Open Science (COS): A US-based nonprofit organization whose mission to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of research. Toward this end, COS manages several projects that are helping build capacity in the open community.
• CERN: CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is a world leader in high energy physics research, and also a world leader in open access research publishing through its partnership with APS on SCOAP3.
• CHORUS: A cross-repository portal, designed to identify all public access and open-access materials, and improve identification of these materials, plus improve discovery, access, compliance, and preservation.
• Coalition for Networked Information (CNI): CNI represents the digital information interests of a wide range of member organizations from higher education, publishing, information technology, government agencies, and libraries, and beyond, and fosters connections and collaborations between these communities.
• Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions (COAPI): An organization that helps North American universities develop open access policies (membership levels are based on the degree of development of a university’s open access policies).
• Committee on Data of the International Council for Science (CODATA): CODATA exists to promote global collaboration to improve the availability and usability of data for all areas of research.  CODATA supports the principle that data produced by research and susceptible to be used for research should be as open as possible and as closed as necessary. CODATA works also to advance the interoperability and the usability of such data: research data should be intelligently open or FAIR.
• Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE): An international organization dedicated to educating and supporting editors and publishers and developing best practices that preserve and promote the transparency and integrity of the scholarly record.
• Creative Commons (CC): Through its innovative and widely-used copyright licenses (such as CC-BY), Creative Commons is the recognized international leader in developing, supporting, and stewarding legal and technical infrastructure that maximizes digital creativity, sharing, and innovation.
• CrossRef: An association of scholarly publishers that develops shared infrastructure to support more effective scholarly communication.
• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ): The world’s leading directory of open access peer-reviewed journals.
• Force 11: A global volunteer community of scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers and research funders working together to facilitate change toward improved knowledge creation and sharing.
• GitHub: A web-based service that provides a source code repository.
• Google Scholar: Google’s popular and widely-used search engine for indexing scholarly literature.
• International DOI Foundation (IDF): Nonprofit membership organization responsible for issuing and managing digital object identifiers (DOI’s).
• Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC): A government and member-supported organization providing UK universities and colleges with shared digital infrastructure and services.
• Knowledge Unlatched: A leading online platform offering free access to scholarly content, and providing libraries with a central place to support open access models.
• Max Planck Society: One of the world’s largest and most successful non-university research institutions, and also a leader in open access reform (see “global flip” in definitions).
• National Information Standards Organization (NISO): NISO’s mission is to identify, develop, disseminate, and maintain voluntary, consensus-based technical standards for managing information in a changing environment.
• National Institute of Health (NIH): US agency which provides the majority of US public funding for medical research, and has a leading role in the implementation of the US public access program. Also manages PubMed and PubMed Central.
• National Science Foundation (NSF): US agency which provides significant funding for US natural and social science research.
• OCLC: OCLC is a nonprofit global library cooperative providing shared technology services, original research and community programs so that libraries can better fuel learning, research and innovation.
• Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe (OpenAIRE): A multi-country EU effort whose goal is to promote open scholarship and substantially improve the discoverability and reusability of research publications and data.
• Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA): A trade association representing the interests of open access publishers globally in all scientific, technical and scholarly disciplines.
• Open Scholarship Initiative (OSI): A global organization working with all stakeholder groups in scholarly communication to develop and promote globally fair and effective open policies.
• ORCID: An organization which supplies and manages persistent digital identifiers to distinguish individual researchers, and also supports integration in research workflows.
• PLOS: The world’s largest open access publisher and a driving force in the open access movement.
• Public Knowledge Project (PKP): A multi-university initiative developing free, open source software and conducting research to improve the quality and reach of scholarly publishing.
• Publishers: This is an overly broad category of stakeholders, including every entity from large commercial publishers to university presses, society publishers, non-university research institutions and small startups. In the “large commercial publisher” subcategory, Elsevier, SpringerNature (Palgrave MacMillan), Wiley, and other major commercial scholarly publishers are highly influential; Elsevier alone accounted for 20% of all journal articles published in 2017 and 5% of all open access articles, and manages foundational publishing and discovery tools and services such as SCOPUS, ScienceDirect, and Mendeley. All of these companies are working to accommodate the wishes of their clients and build out open options that work in the marketplace, especially for open data. Similarly, many university presses, society publishers, and non-university research institution publishers are also experimenting with and rolling out open options and reforms.
• PubMed Central (PMC): A free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the US National Institutes of Health’s Library of Medicine.
• PubMed: A repository consisting of more than 26 million citations for the biomedical literature.
• Research4Life: A public-private partnership (inluding WHO, FAO, UNEP, WIPO, ILO, Cornell and Yale Universities, the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers and up to 175 international publishers) providing developing countries with free or low cost access to academic and professional peer-reviewed content online.
• Research Data Alliance (RDA): An international research community organization started by the European Commission, the US National Science Foundation, NISO, and the Australian Department of Innovation, whose mission is to build the social and technical bridges to enable open sharing of data.
• Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC): An international alliance of academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication, and long-time leader in open advocacy.
• Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO): A major Latin American cooperative working across borders and institutions to develop a robust, common methodology for the preparation, storage and dissemination of scientific literature.
• SCOPUS: Scopus, an Elsevier product, is the world’s largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature: scientific journals, books and conference proceedings.
• SHERPA/Juliet: A complement to Romeo, SHERPA Juliet is a searchable database and single focal point of up-to-date information concerning funders’ policies and their requirements on open access, publication and data archiving.
• SHERPA/Romeo: Global database of publisher copyright policies. Managed by JISC.
• Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP): A nonprofit organization promoting and advancing communication among all sectors of the scholarly publication community through networking, information dissemination, and facilitation of new developments in the field.
• UK Research and Innovation: The primary research management body in the UK, operating with significant government funding and authority and combining the resources of seven different UK Research Councils.
• United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO): The UN body charged with developing and advocating global approaches and solutions to issues regarding education, science and culture.
• Unpaywall: A searchable database of nearly 20 million legally free scholarly articles from 50,000 publishers, repositories, library systems and information products worldwide.
• Web of Science (WoS): A Clarivate product, WoS is one of the most widely used citation indexes in science.
• Wellcome Trust: One of the world’s private philanthropies, focused largely on funding biomedical research. Wellcome has created significant open policies for its funded researchers, and these policies are being followed by many other organizations.
• World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO): The United Nations agency charged with managing global intellectual property services, policy, information and cooperation.

The initial version of this list was drawn from the work of Jon Tennant and Ross Mounce, “Open Research Glossary,” May 2015, Figshare. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1482094