Since the launch of our first funding cycle in 2018, SCOSS has been selecting essential open science infrastructures (OSIs) worldwide to help them on their pathway to sustainability. To date, we have concentrated on addressing the financial sustainability of selected infrastructure by helping fund-raise.

After 5 pledging cycles, SCOSS wants to go beyond fundraising for OSIs and seeks to explore how to further strengthen the landscape by facilitating more connection-building between the SCOSS infrastructures by developing a community of practice. It is therefore now exploring where we can share resources, close important gaps and work more together to contribute to a create a stronger open ecosystem.

We call this group, this community of practice, the SCOSS Family.

The SCOSS Family continues to grow with each annual call for entries. And as in a family: we exchange ideas, disagree, discuss, and we learn from each other.

To date, this includes AmeliCA, arXiv, Dryad, DSpace, DOAJ, DOAB, REDALYC, LA Referencia, OAPEN, OpenCitations, PKP, ROR and Sherpa RoMEO and since 2023 RDA and Software Heritage.

To this end, the SCOSS Family is starting to meet online in group work sessions. In 2023, it organized four SCOSS Family Sprints to collectively work on important and shared topics, such as

• Collectively advocating the importance of open infrastructure,
• Collective self-assessment against the Principles of Open Infrastructure (POSI),
• Mapping the open science infrastructure ecosystem including SCOSS infrastructures,
• and Strategies for the 'post-SCOSS phase'.

We had our first public event on 30 November, bringing many infrastructures together to talk about their growth, partly due to SCOSS collective funding efforts. It is an impressive listen.

Watch the event here: