There is a quiet crisis happening in research infrastructures. While many institutions still prefer Open platforms over proprietary platforms, some institutions are moving from open platforms to closed ones. Each decision, made in isolation, seems reasonable. But together, they are slowly dismantling something that took decades of collective effort to build: a global, community-owned infrastructure for knowledge that belongs to every citizen of the world.
At 4Science, we feel the weight of this moment and the need to speak plainly.
Open source carries a promise. A promise that the knowledge your institution creates, preserves, and shares will remain free to access, free to integrate, free to evolve – and never locked behind a contract you didn’t write, or a roadmap you cannot control.
When you move to a proprietary platform, you are not just “changing software”. You are handing over the future of your research data and knowledge to someone else’s business model. You are stepping out of a community of thousands of institutions, developers, and researchers who have spent years building something together, for each other.
That community is anything but abstract. It is the researcher in São Paulo who benefits from the metadata standards your team helped refine. It is the university library in Nairobi running on the same platform as Oxford. It is the cultural heritage institution in Bologna preserving manuscripts that may otherwise disappear. Every open implementation strengthens all the others.
DSpace is over 3,000 institutions choosing, every day, to keep knowledge open. And this community has never been stronger. The upcoming merger of DSpace and DSpace-CRIS into a unified platform – DSpace 10 available now, DSpace 11 coming in 2027 – delivers what only proprietary solutions once could do: a complete, integrated ecosystem for repositories, research information management, and digital collections. The gap has closed. The excuses have run out.
So, before your institution makes this decision, we ask you to sit with a few questions: as a matter of conscience, more than a mere checklist:
- Who will own your data in ten years?
- Will your future platform allow you to collaborate freely with others, or keep you inside a walled garden?
- Are you investing in a commercial product, or in a global community that keeps building and sharing for everyone?
- What kind of institution do you want to be, or to become?
If you are worried about resources or the complexity of implementation, you do not have to face this alone. Multiple companies work closely together with the DSpace community as Registered Service Provider, contributing to the community and offering commercial services around it. Choosing openness for your platform, keeps you from running in a vendor lock, while still being able to get professional support. 4Science has been a Certified Platinum DSpace Provider and core contributor to this ecosystem for over a decade. We walk with institutions through every step – consulting, migration, hosting, customization, training, integration – so your team can focus entirely on what matters most: your collections, your researchers, your mission. And all your data remains yours.
Choosing open source is an act of solidarity. It says we believe knowledge is a common good, and we are willing to protect it.
The technology is ready. The community is waiting. The moment is now.
Choose openness. Choose sustainability. Choose a future your institution helps build
Learn more at www.4science.com