Open infrastructure principles (POSI)

TextRefs commits to the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI) v2.0 — the governance, sustainability, and insurance framework also adopted by Crossref, DataCite, OpenCitations, and ROR. This page is a living self-assessment: the Board reviews it at least once a year and reports to the General Assembly. Most principles are already secured by our statutes, mission, and governance regulation; the commitments below close the remaining gaps so this is an honest statement rather than an aspiration.

Our POSI commitments

The Board adopts the following operating commitments under statutes Art. 20 (authority to issue regulations and policies):

• Non-lobbying. TextRefs will not lobby for regulatory or policy change to entrench its own position or serve a narrow self-interest. It remains politically and religiously neutral.
• Living will. If TextRefs can no longer operate, the community loses nothing it depends on. Registry data stays available under CC0 1.0 and the code under AGPL-3.0-or-later; significant releases are deposited with Zenodo; and on dissolution all assets pass to a like, tax-exempt public-benefit organisation in Switzerland (statutes Art. 21).
• Regular review of purpose and community value. At least annually, the Board reviews the registry’s relevance, effectiveness, and level of community support, and reports the outcome to the General Assembly.
• Transparent operations. Annual financials, the fee schedule, and the roadmap are published publicly — not only to members. Operating policies and procedures are open by default.
• Goal to generate a surplus, and to hold reserves. TextRefs aims to operate with a modest surplus and to build an operating reserve targeting roughly six months of running costs, governed by a Board reserves policy. Running costs are deliberately low (domain, hosting, and Zenodo archiving are near-zero), which makes this target realistic on a bootstrap basis.
• Time-limited funds for time-limited activities. Grants and other time-limited income fund time-limited work only; recurring operations are covered by sustainable, recurring revenue.
• Transition and succession planning. TextRefs is in its founding phase and currently depends on a small number of individuals — a bus-factor risk we acknowledge openly and are actively reducing. We commit to documenting credentials and access, naming backups for every critical role (domain, hosting, Zenodo, repository administration), and maintaining a written handover plan.
• Patent non-assertion. TextRefs will not assert patents against the use of its standard, schemas, JSON-LD contexts, or reference implementations.
• Third-party preservation. Each significant dataset and standard release is tagged in Git and deposited with Zenodo (or a comparable trusted archive) so it survives independently of TextRefs’s own infrastructure.

Self-assessment

Status values: Met — already secured by an existing document. Adopted (rollout pending) — committed in policy above, but full execution depends on the project moving out of its pre-implementation phase.

Governance

Principle	Status	Evidence
Coverage across the scholarly enterprise	Met	Mission §1, statutes Art. 2 — international, open circle of beneficiaries
Stakeholder governed	Met	Board-governed Verein with General Assembly (statutes Art. 7–12)
Non-discriminatory participation or membership	Met	Statutes Art. 3, governance §2 — no member privilege over public data
Transparent governance	Met	Governance regulation, public statutes
Cannot lobby	Met	Non-lobbying commitment above; statutes Art. 1
Living will	Met	Living-will commitment above; statutes Art. 21
Regular review of purpose and community value	Met	Regular-review commitment above

Sustainability

Principle	Status	Evidence
Transparent operations	Adopted (rollout pending)	Transparent-operations commitment above; statutes Art. 18
Time-limited funds for time-limited activities	Met	Commitment above
Goal to generate surplus	Met	Surplus & reserves commitment above; statutes Art. 3–4
Financial reserves guided by policy	Adopted (rollout pending)	Surplus & reserves commitment above (≈6 months target)
Mission-consistent revenue generation	Met	Statutes Art. 4
Revenue generated from services, not data	Met	Registry data is CC0; revenue from membership, donations, grants, and purpose-aligned services
Volunteer labour	Met	Statutes Art. 15, expense regulation
Transition planning	Adopted (rollout pending)	Transition & succession commitment above

Insurance

Principle	Status	Evidence
Open source	Met	Code under AGPL-3.0-or-later
Open and secure data accessibility	Met	Registry data under CC0 1.0
Available and preserved	Adopted (rollout pending)	Third-party preservation commitment above; Git tags + Zenodo deposit
Patent non-assertion	Met	Patent non-assertion commitment above
Prioritise interoperability and open standards	Met	JSON-LD standard with curated mappings to CTS URNs, Wikidata, DOIs, and ARKs (standard)