 It is with great pleasure that I would like to welcome you, Ginni Hendricks, to this exclusive interview on the occasion of the International Open Access Week. Being a strong advocate of open scholarly infrastructure, I'm sure the scholarly community is awaiting to get inside the room that they have been seeking for always. Since 2015, Ginni has been instrumental in shaping and leading the community team at CrossFit. Her portfolio encompasses a diverse range of responsibilities, including community engagement and communications, member experience, technical support and metadata strategy. Prior to her tenure at CrossFit, Ginni spent a day at RB where she provided invaluable consultancy services within scholarly communication. In 2018, Ginni founded the Metadata 2020 Collaboration, a visionary initiator advocating literature, connected, reusable and open metadata. She has been a guiding force behind several open infrastructure initiators, including ROR, the Research Organization Registry, and POSI, the principles of open scholarly infrastructure. Not one to rest on her laurels. Ginni recently founded 4th-11th Extreme Community Log, a hub dedicated to open research. So, as we delve into this interview, we look forward to gaining insights from your wealth of experience, Ginni, and your visionary leadership in championing open access and the advancement in scholarly communication. Thank you very much. Yeah, I'm very flattered to be invited and hope I have something useful to say. Thank you. Definitely. We are sure too. So, to start with, just in one sentence, if you could share your experience on the evolution of open access over the years and its influence on scholarly communication, what would that be? Well, it's been a fairly slow and bumpy road, but where access has been opened, it's had a hugely positive effect on scholarly communications as a whole ecosystem. And one effect that comes to mind is the growth of newer fields like meta-research, so the ability for science to analyze itself and report on itself. Some people call it research on research or meta-research, and that wouldn't be as easy without open access to articles and other content. Yeah. So, like you said, but considering your role in shaping community engagement across web, how do you see the balance between community-driven initiatives and commercialization in the context of open knowledge? Yes, this is interesting because often people conflate non-profit with open, but that's not always the case. There are some commercial tools and platforms and workflows that are very open, have open code, open data, and conversely, there are nonprofits that have sales targets and things like that. So, it is possible to be a for-profit initiative that also has forkable code and data, and I think commercial efforts are not inherently bad for science, but they're usually not foundational infrastructure, but more like services built on top. So, they all rely on the kind of underlying infrastructures like Crossref, Orkid, and Datasite, but some of those tools built on top of the foundational infrastructure are really valuable. They're useful, they add value, and they're the ones often pushing people like us to improve because they work a bit faster and they're looking for more comprehensive open data to build on and things like that. And it's sometimes quite hard to tell whether an organization or a search tool or whatever is truly open, but there are the principles of open scholarly infrastructure that you mentioned at the beginning, which I wasn't a writer of initially, but have adopted those principles as Crossref and a couple of other initiatives I'm involved with. So, those principles are just principles, so that means they can be a little bit interpreted, and about 15 infrastructures now have audited themselves against those principles, and nobody's doing it perfectly, but it's a way for the community to assess who is at least working towards that, who cares about the ability to, if they fail, is everything available for the community to recreate it in a different way? That's kind of like an insurance policy in a way. And yeah, it'd be great if some of the bigger commercial infrastructures or services would challenge themselves to more open governance with open code, open data, it's definitely possible. So, it'd be great if some of the big, the tools that people rely on, you know, Google Scholar or, you know, Dimensions or something like that, could also consider the principles of open scholarly infrastructure. And then it would be all comparable and people could see who's working towards a more open infrastructure future. Yes, I absolutely agree with you and the more point that you mentioned that there are several community-driven initiatives and open access initiatives that people have launched, you have been a very strong advocate of open access infrastructure and open scholarly infrastructure. You launched the, like you founded the metadata 2020 collaboration. In that sense, how do you think it has this initiative impacted the scholarly landscape? And what challenges and opportunities do you foresee for open metadata and the future? Okay, yes. Well, metadata, it has had an impact that campaign metadata 2020. So, I now see metadata on the agenda of almost every conference that is going on in this space. So, it's been redirect, I think, and not only attributable to metadata 2020, of course, but we at Crossref have seen a very steady increase in our members providing more metadata, enriching their metadata records. And we have seen, you know, more people asking us what can we do to improve our metadata in Crossref. So, it has had an impact, whether it's direct or indirect, I'm not sure. But yeah, I see metadata as an absolute necessity for open science, including open access. And there will be no open science without open metadata, like that is, that's like my catchphrase, I think. So, those same efforts on meta research or research rely heavily on open metadata. And even while some publishers, you know, are needing to retain their more traditional fee models, the efforts that they're making in open metadata does show their direction of travel, I think. And I think, you know, talked about sort of challenges, sometimes it's really technically difficult. Smaller, younger, you know, one person journals find it really difficult to generate metadata. But there are tools and platforms that help them with that. There are also open and free like open journal systems from the public knowledge project, for example, has a direct plug in into Crossref. So, you can fill out a form and that generates metadata in Crossref. And we see the larger publishers as well, really committing and having whole projects to like Wiley, for example, just spend probably a year or more gathering and formatting all of the abstracts from their 11 million articles and have just deposited those in Crossref. And abstracts are critical for that, what we mentioned, the meta research, because, well, first of all, it's like a shop window for your content, you know, so it's like an advert. It tells people what the research is about. It's a little synopsis or, yeah, summary. And, you know, they can also be analyzed, people could apply machine learning, as we mentioned at the beginning, to, yeah, determine subject classifications and many useful things. So I think we'll see other publishers trying to do large scale projects to format some of their metadata, even things that they wouldn't have thought of as metadata before like abstracts, you know, they would have thought that they would have thought of that as content, I think, but it is metadata, just like references, that all needs to be in Crossref and completely open and then and then anyone can use it to analyze it. So I'm looking forward to that steady, you know, increase as well. Yes, I'm sure we are not that far from seeing that in series altogether in adoption of metadata across platforms as well. So now, just speaking more into, you know, community over commercialization, as we've seen for this year's international open access fee, one of the communities that honestly pop right up in my mind is the 411th upstream community blog, which you recently co founded, and I have been fortunate to have been one of the authors who have contributed in the blog. Yeah. I'll skip this initiator. I'm very keen on understanding what was the motivation behind curating a community blog? And how do you see it shaping the narrative of scholarly communication? Yeah, thank you for mentioning upstream. It is quite new. I have to mention the other co-founders, so John Chidaki primarily was his idea. And he invited myself, Martin Fena and Chris Ferguson, and persuaded the 411 board to support this. And it seems like, you know, it's just a blogging platform, but blogs are becoming a lot more important in science itself. And one of the upstream editors, with sort of like a mini light touch editors group as well, Martin Fena also has a service called Rogue Scholar, where he's indexing science blogs. So we all believe that blogging actually in research communications is going to become more important. You know, it's not as formal as preprints, but they're very important. They should be included in the literature. They should have and have citations and be cited. But yeah, so with upstream, I think, you know, there wasn't really one platform. Some of us were finding like, well, our different organizations want to share, want to co-write something. Where are we going to post it? Because it's not really, doesn't really belong on the 411 blog, because it's nothing to do with 411. It's nothing to do with Crossref, but people who have thoughts about the industry. So there wasn't really a place for open, you know, open research, open publishing, open governance, open access. So we just wanted a platform that was that, you know, that place that anybody could submit to. And that was the second thing, as we really wanted to find and read and hear about new voices that, you know, I feel like Crossref and my role at Crossref introduces me to so much, such a breadth of the community from funders to government policy makers and obviously publishers and researchers. But we're still hearing from the same people with the same perspectives at the same conferences. And so even though it's a volunteer role, so we probably haven't put, you know, as much effort into it just because we don't have time, it really is there for anybody to kind of submit to. And yeah, we want to kind of pave the way so that this sort of level of thinking and this direction of travel in open, can we can find the next generation of thought leaders really. So it's quite a lofty aim with just a blogging platform, but it's deliberately very low barriers like we call ourselves that the editors group, but it's quite light touch. It just has to fit the topic and be scheduled in. And yeah, the readership is growing as well. So it's it's still in the hundreds, but it's approaching towards the thousands. So we need to turn those readers into writers. But yeah, personally, you know, it feels like volunteering for upstream, it could shape it could shape the community in the discussion around open science and future. But we really definitely need more, more perspectives and more diverse perspectives than than what we're getting at the moment. Absolutely. And you know, providing a platform as such, which is not confining the writers who write in this original research based content, but also giving them an opportunity to lay out the narrative, their perspectives, their opinions and producing method or leaders out of it will really create a great revolution in the industry itself with people getting a platform to speak about different, for example, the kind of challenges that they may have faced on the way in which they have overcome it. So the readers would, I believe, will definitely overcome it and would at least definitely learn something out of every blog that's there on the platform. Oh, brilliant. Yeah. Some of it's just like, oh, this is a convenient, like it's a convenient platform to have a joint like Matt Bayes from Datasite and myself blogged something last week because it wasn't only Datasite or only CrossRaf. So we're like, okay, this is a convenient venue. But there's other topics on there about, yeah, the experience of entering the scholarly communications ecosystem and experiences of scholarly marginalization. And these are really important stories for everybody to hear. Yes, absolutely. So as we speak more on increasing the amount of open infrastructure across platforms, and how do you think can organizations strike a balance between sustainability and the principles of openness, especially in the context of developing and gaining scholarly infrastructure? Yeah, I think it's really hard, actually, because everyone in our normal day to day lives, you know, airport books and things are talking about monetization of data and how to monetize AR, how to monetize all the time. And actually, we do not think about how to monetize things. I think most even the big commercial publishers are not always thinking how to monetize this, how to monetize that. They are thinking how to add value whilst remaining sustainable. And so for the ones that were based on commercial models, that's a much harder shift. And of course, you know, some of them are deliberately being slow, you know, dragging their feet, but others are really not. But in terms of infrastructure, you know, it's not free to run. And the scale of CrossRaf at the moment, for example, we have 150 million records that we have to look after. Each record is getting bigger and bigger every year as people add abstracts or whatever. And, you know, nobody really thinks about that because they're completely free to use and more metadata is better. But CrossRaf's costs are rising because, you know, next year, we're budgeting nearly a million US dollars just for data storage and processing. So because we have billions more users and API queries, you know, that we need to support those technically. We also need to support those people. So we have, you know, we use contractors for technical support and the costs are really are, really are rising. But so is the investment in CrossRaf. So it's, I feel a really good example actually CrossRaf reached sustainability 20 years ago, after about three years, I think of operation. And of course, it had loans and it had massive investment mostly from the large publishers and societies. But now we have nearly 20,000 organizations, you know, Elsevier and Taylor Francis are just one, two, three, you know, five big organizations, but they get the same single vote as the other 20,000 organizations or increasingly individuals. You know, so it really has seen a huge community investment and pretty much unchallenged sort of support. So it's just a way of life now. And so because DOIs are, you know, ubiquitous and it's expected, right, that's that's how people link things together in research, they are, they are sort of expected to be free because they are free at the point of use, they're free to use. For many people, they're free to create as well. So it's just a way of life now with digital communications to use this infrastructure behind the scenes. And so people don't really see the small team that we have trying to keep things running. And yeah, but it's going in a good direction, you know, it's it's we're getting more support from more corners of the organization funders, especially are really interested now in not necessarily funding Crossref, but contributing their open metadata about grants and about the the projects that they are funding. So yeah, it's expanding and it's growing, which has cost implications, but also it makes it there's more of a, you know, united kind of support for that for Crossref as an infrastructure anyway, which is which is really good. I also like, I definitely agree with the fact that funders do play a major role in, you know, advancing following the institutional research in itself altogether. But again, the searchers are not that aware of where to find the right funds and they just get into that whole puzzle wherein, where should I go, what should I look for, will I be eligible for this and all of these things. And in that process, we recently conducted a survey, a global survey, where we realized that people were not even aware of publication funds, which is, you know, which is kind of constraining them from actually going ahead and publishing an open access platforms, which will gain their research more amount of, you know, recognition and you know, the visibility would increase and eventually the advancement in science will increase as well. But this lack of awareness is something that I think all of us as a community should really consider is to propel and, you know, ensure that the advancement in science just shoots out to another galaxy probably. Yeah, I love that. Yeah. So, as we celebrate the International Open Access Week this month, what's that one advice you'd like to give to scholars, publishers and institutions looking to actively contribute and benefit from the open access movement in the years to come? Yeah, I think, you know, thinking about what you just said about scholars kind of like not being aware of their options. It's a real shame that a scholar has to do research in advance of just kind of like, you know, they have to think about that instead of the actual progress that they're making in a scientific field. But there are more tools now that should be looked at. And I would highlight one called OA report. It's OA.reports and it's led by Spark, I think sort of US European initiative. And it shows dashboards at the institution level. So even the institutions you're working with are now being assessed on how open they are. So how what proportion of published papers that came out of that institution are open access. And they're also looking at open metadata and policies and things like that as well. So I think institutions have the most to do, I would say, in supporting open access fully. Funders for sure as well, you know, funders are mandating where they can. And there's tools and initiatives that are trying to help people share information about, okay, was this an APC funded? You know, was the APC included in the grant? Things like that. But we need more open dashboards at the institution level, I think. And I would love to see, I think individual scholars, let's not give them more work to do. Maybe maybe I would say for an individual scholar, just be aware that you are like part of a wider movement. And any tiny choice you make really can really can make a difference. It's like, you know, it's like voting in an election or something, every vote counts, not always every vote counts. But this feels like, you know, a small choice could make a big impact. If everybody kind of thinks of themselves as part of the wider ecosystem. But I would say institutions, I would love to see universities and university bodies and management challenge themselves a little bit more about the incentives that they're supporting and just come together more for open science. There's a lot of pressure on publishers to do this that and then they're right in the middle. But institutions are at the beginning and at the end with the creators and the consumers of research. And so their role needs to be, I think, yeah, a little bit more coordinated. And I'd love to see that.