• DARIAH EU
• Publicationsclose
• Research dataclose
• 2018-2022close
• Open Access close
• Hyper Article en Ligne close
• HAL-ENS-LYON close
• DARIAH EU close
• Energy Research close

International audience; This paper develops the concept of network sustainability. To become and stay sustainable, distributed research infrastructures must satisfy present needs while at the same time be flexible and resilient to meet future requirements. For this it is not enough to merely build a resilient economic model and be technically viable. Research infrastructures that can understand, address and shape future needs have a sustainable community network. Clear characteristics of a research infrastructure with a sustainable network are that partners gain access to other networks and interest groups, that knowledge, information and expertise is shared freely among partners, that the infrastructure increases partners’ visibilities and vice versa, and that partners are enabled to stay current and state-of-the-art. This is shown on OPERAS (open access in the european research area through scholarly communication), a research infrastructure for open scholarly communication in the social sciences and humanities, and its partner the Max Weber Foundation, a German research institution.

International audience; A wide range of initiatives for developing research and data infrastructures have been funded in recent years. There is a growing concern amongst the academic community to maintain the resources invested beyond the period of the original research funding. If technical progress has been made to preserve the data themselves, few thinking and operational solutions exist for the institutions that create, disseminate, curate and preserve the data. How to ensure their existence over the medium or the long-term? This paper is a case study: it addresses the sustainability issues faced by Persée, a French platform dedicated to digitized documentary heritage that was launched in 2003. Through this example, the aim is to present, in practical terms, how an organization has to adapt and to change to sustain over time. Persée tested and combined various mechanisms (technical actions, users’ involvement, organizational evolution, marketing, funding models) with reciprocal influence, to achieve sustainability. Rather than a steady state, ensuring the long term existence of a data infrastructure is an ongoing and resource intensive process.