Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A scholarly identifier service publishes a public POSI self-assessment and addresses identified gaps within a year.
- Is an instance
A library consortium uses POSI compliance as a criterion in choosing which infrastructures to fund.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A service claiming POSI alignment without publishing a self-assessment.
- Not an instance
An infrastructure passing POSI governance criteria but with no open-source codebase.
Editorial commentary
POSI (the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure) is a framework for judging whether a piece of scholarly infrastructure — an identifier registry, a citation graph, a metadata index — is genuinely community-controlled or merely open in name. First articulated in 2015 by Geoffrey Bilder, Jennifer Lin and Cameron Neylon, it organises its principles under three headings.
The three categories
- Governance: stakeholder-governed, non-discriminatory membership, transparent operations, cannot lobby against the community it serves, and maintains a ‘living will’ describing what happens if it fails.
- Sustainability: time-limited funds used only for time-limited activities, a goal of generating a working-capital surplus, a mission-consistent revenue model, and published finances.
- Insurance: open source software, open data, bulk data available on request, and a formal patent non-assertion covenant.
POSI v2.0 (October 2025)
POSI was revised to version 2.0 in October 2025, expanding from the original 16 principles to 17 across the same three categories. The revision is credited to ‘POSI Adopters (2025)’ rather than the three original authors — the framework is now maintained by the community that uses it.
How organisations demonstrate alignment
POSI is not a certifying body and does not audit or score organisations. Alignment is shown through a self-published, periodically updated self-assessment against each principle. Crossref, DataCite, ORCID, DOAJ, ROR and OpenCitations are commonly cited as POSI-aligned infrastructures that publish self-assessments. OpenAlex has been a signatory since 2021, reaffirmed after v2.0.
Not a research-assessment reform declaration
DORA and CoARA govern how researchers and institutions should evaluate research outputs; POSI governs whether the infrastructure those evaluations depend on — the registries and indexes — is itself trustworthy and won’t be paywalled or shut down without warning. For the broader concept of what makes infrastructure ‘open’ in this sense, see open infrastructure; this page covers POSI’s specific principles and how organisations are assessed.
Frequently asked questions
Is POSI a certification scheme?
No. There is no auditing body; organisations self-assess and publish the results, and the community judges credibility from that disclosure.
What changed in POSI v2.0?
The principle count grew from 16 to 17 across the same three categories; the underlying structure was preserved.
Which organisations are POSI-aligned?
Widely cited examples include Crossref, DataCite, ORCID, DOAJ, ROR, OpenCitations and OpenAlex.
References
- Bilder G, Lin J, Neylon C, ‘Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructure’, 2015, updated 2020; POSI Adopters, v2.0, October 2025 (openscholarlyinfrastructure.org).
Also known as
POSI
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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