OSI is a global collaborative effort between all major stakeholders in scholarly publishing to improve the future of how research information gets published, shared and accessed. The foundation of this effort is a 10-year series of annual meetings where high-level stakeholder representatives work together to solve important issues. Extensive work and collaboration outside these meetings also occurs.

How do we best manage the explosive growth of knowledge in society today? In scholarly research, our stakeholder community’s approaches to this challenge have not been unified, and the result has been a persistence (and even widening) of access gaps and approaches, with adverse impacts on global economic development, education, discovery and effective public policy. The time to act together is now.

The goal of OSI is to build a sustainable, robust framework for direct communication and cooperation among nations, universities, researchers, publishers, libraries, funders, policy makers, scientific societies and other stakeholder groups in order to find common understanding and workable solutions and build the future of scholarly communication together.

OSI includes 390 high-level participants (as of mid-2017) from 250+ institutions, 18 stakeholder groups, and 24 countries. Funding during 2016-17 has come from 14 different sponsors and totals approximately $303,000 to-date. OSI was launched in late 2014 by the Science Communication Institute, which oversees this effort with guidance from OSI participants (via OSI’s governance rules).