OA.Works joins Code for Science & Society

We’re thrilled to announce OA.Works has joined Code for Science and Society (CS&S), a US-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit empowering communities to build technology for the public good. “Joining CS&S marks a new phase of maturity for OA.Works, and their expertise in providing fiscal sponsorship to open source tech projects will allow us to capitalize on the many years of growth we enjoyed while being incubated at SPARC,” said Joe McArthur, Director of OA.Works. “Critically, this evolution reaffirms and continues to strengthen our commitment, and ability, to build free, open-source tools as a not-for-profit project.”

Since 2015, OA.Works has been incubated as an independently managed and funded sub-project of SPARC. “It’s been a real pleasure to watch OA.Works grow into an important provider of high-quality tools supporting open access to knowledge,” said Heather Joseph, Executive Director of SPARC. “We’ve been proud to play a small role in supporting their progress since their early days as a student-founded project developing the Open Access Button, and are delighted that they are moving to a fiscal sponsor that can provide the high-level technical guidance - and community - that CS&S is so perfectly positioned to give them.”

OA.Works will join CS&S as a fiscally sponsored project, a common arrangement for small nonprofit projects that enables us to focus on our mission while benefiting from the support of experts for operational and financial services. “We’ve been following OA.Works for years, and are thrilled to work with the team in their next phase of growth,“ said Danielle Robinson, Executive Director of CS&S. “We’ve been consistently impressed by OA.Works’ products to make open access easy. Beyond their products, OA.Works’ commitment to community engagement, transparency, and governance sets them up for sustainable impact.” Added Robinson, “At CS&S, our mission is advancing the power of data to improve the lives of all people through education, research, and technology. OA.Works’ open source software for open access improves public access to information, making them an ideal partner for fiscal sponsorship.” OA.Works joins others at CS&S, including Invest in Open Infrastructure, OpenRefine, and PREreview. You can learn more about CS&S’s work at codeforsociety.org.

To govern OA.Works, we’ve established an inaugural Advisory Committee composed of people from the library and scholarly open source communities that have played pivotal roles in guiding the project to where it is today. The group's top priority will be steering OA.Works through this transition, updating internal processes to reflect the transition, and expanding the committee to represent more of the community. Learn more about the committee and its members on our website.

If you’d like to learn more about the spinout, fiscal sponsorship, or our governance, you can visit our new transparency and updated governance pages. If you have questions, feel free to get in touch.

Finally, we have many people to thank. Thank you to the teams across CS&S, SPARC, and the New Venture Fund (SPARC’s fiscal sponsor) for all their advice and work during the transfer process. We also sincerely appreciate the work of the SPARC Steering Committee and Code for Science & Society Board of Directors for their review and approval throughout the process. Thank you to the Arcadia Fund, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for their generous support of our work and their efforts to support the spin. Last but not least, we are deeply grateful to SPARC for the years of stewardship, and look forward to continuing to work together in new ways.