Jul 2026· BIBLIOTHEK Forschung und Praxis· Vol 50, pp. 163 - 174· 0 citations· 14 references
TL;DR
The GKFI serves as a blueprint for the sustainable provision of digital common goods in the humanities and cultural studies, and functions not as a replacement for project-based innovation, but as a complementary anchor of stability.
Abstract
Abstract The sustainability of digital research infrastructures (RIs) beyond project-based funding cycles poses significant structural and economic challenges for memory institutions. In particular, the asymmetry between locally incurred operating costs and globally distributed utility (local costs, global benefits) often leads to a legitimacy deficit within hosting institutions and fosters the emergence of funding graveyards. This article introduces the Association for Research Infrastructures in the Humanities and Cultural Studies (GKFI). The legal form of a registered association (eingetragener Verein) enables the transition from individual institutional responsibility to a collective framework, distributing the burden of infrastructure provision and maintenance. Using the GKFI as a case study, we demonstrate how a curated service catalogue, the coordination of national nodes for European Research Infrastructure Consortia (ERICs), and binding governance contribute to the stability of the research landscape (even without a financial budget). The association functions not as a replacement for project-based innovation, but as a complementary anchor of stability, ensuring the long-term availability of scholarly services independent of rigid funding durations. Thus, the GKFI serves as a blueprint for the sustainable provision of digital common goods in the humanities and cultural studies.
Sustainable infrastructure transformation demands the integration of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) principles into public sector business strategies. The Ministry of Public Works has issued a number of centrally designed policy instruments the Building Management Information System (SIMBG), the Green Building Mandate (BGH), the Domestic Component Level (TKDN) obligations, and State Property grants to local governments but their implementation at the regional level remains uneven. This research questions how governance asymmetry between the central and regional governments affects the adoption of sustainable infrastructure standards, through what mechanisms policy instruments are distorted into administrative compliance, and what kind of governance models can position ministries as strategic orchestrators. The study uses a qualitative plural case study design based on document analysis on secondary sources available to the public, for the period 2021–2025, with four purposively selected policy cases. The evidence relies mainly on regulations, official evaluation results, and the findings of state audit bodies; data are coded deductively using the Technology Organization Environment (TOE) framework and inducively for emerging mechanisms, followed by cross case synthesis. One diagnostic pattern anchored the analysis: The 2024 National SPBE Index reached 3.12 on a scale of 5 and exceeded the medium term target, while only 48 of the 615 agencies evaluated achieved the highest predicate, an aggregate achievement that conceals a highly uneven distribution. In all four cases, the instrument establishes compliance thresholds that can be administratively verifiable but independent of substantive outputs. The resulting pattern is interpreted as means ends decoupling, with a self reinforcing form called a compliance trap, understood not as a new concept, but as a domain specific manifestation of isomorphic mimicry in ESG policy. The article proposes a tiered governance model equipped with tiering indicators, the role of actors, two way transition mechanisms, resource needs, and enforcement limits. Because the evidence base is documentary, the findings are presented as propositions that can be generalized analytically and are open to testing, rather than as a causal claim that has been validated.
Ayu Purnamasari Asih, Mohamad Rizan, Muhammad Awaluddin· Journal of Digital Business...· 0 citations
Inaccessibility to peer-reviewed literature has long constrained Indian scholarship, especially given the rising cost of access, sectoral consortia, multiple points of procurement, and libraries’ inability to keep pace with these changes due to limited budgets. The One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) scheme, which was approved by the Union Cabinet in November 2024, stands as the Government of India’s answer to these structural weaknesses, with a cost amounting to INR 6,000 crore over 3 years and an annual amount of INR 150 crore for Article Processing Charge (APC) support from January 1, 2025. This study aims to step out of the descriptive narratives of ONOS and theorise ONOS as a managed national knowledge infrastructure. This study proposes a five-layered conceptual framework to connect policy inputs and outputs vis-à-vis access to public goods, governance and market mediation, institutional mediation, access outcomes, and system-level effects, with explicit feedback loops as a function of public goods, resource-based and diffusion of innovations theories, and the political economy of scholarly publishing. Data analysis was conducted through a qualitative and interpretive documentary approach by focusing on official policy instruments, government communications, and peer-reviewed literature obtained from Scopus during the period 2010-2025. This analysis suggests that there is substantial potential in ONOS for access equity, bargaining power, and national research capacity, while there are unanswered tensions with regard to disciplinary coverage, integration with open access, concentration of publishers, financial sustainability, institutional autonomy, and the digital divide. The framework shows that the legitimacy of a national license hinges on governance quality and is shaped by the role of Library and Information Science (LIS) professionals. Directions for policy refinement and an empirical research agenda based on the framework are also provided in this study.
Dubakula Durga Prasad, Rajesh Rangappa Aldarthi· Journal of Information and K...· 0 citations
Universities are increasingly expected to contribute not only to teaching and research, but also to public-sector innovation, regional development, and digitally enabled governance. This article examines how higher education institutions organize that contribution by comparing two university-based transfer architectures: Smart-EDU Hub @ SNSPA in Bucharest and the distributed transfer portfolio of RheinMain University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSRM). Using a qualitative comparative case-study design based on the document analysis of internal strategy and regulatory documents, institutional webpages, and European policy frameworks, the study analyzes the mission framing, organizational form, program architecture, trust infra-structure, and scaling logic. The documentary analysis indicates that Smart-EDU Hub is formally presented and institutionally organized as a centralized, branded, mission-led platform that bundles conferences, courses, projects, visiting scholars, and publication channels under a recognizable public-facing identity. HSRM, by contrast, is documented as a distributed transfer portfolio linking transfer strategy, dialogue formats, digitally supported teaching, administrative digitalization, continuing education, and AI support services. The comparison should therefore be read as an analysis of formal and publicly documented transfer architectures, not as an evaluation of actual institutional performance, stakeholder experience, or societal impact. The article contributes to Administrative Sciences by conceptualizing university transfer for smart governance as a public-management and governance-design problem. It develops an analytical hybrid transfer-architecture framework in which a visible hub is combined with distributed specialist nodes, shared quality assurance, and explicit safeguards for ethics, cybersecurity, and trustworthy AI.
Christian Schachtner, Cătălin Vrabie· Administrative Sciences· 0 citations
This paper examines how
sustainability
is framed, coordinated, and operationalised across the three levels of European Union (EU) multilevel governance (MLG) by analysing 3466 non‐legislative documents produced between 2011 and 2021 by the European Parliament (EP), the Council of the European Union (Council), and the Committee of the Regions (CoR). Employing the BERTopic method, complemented by a curated sustainability lexicon and systematic validation of topic coherence and intercoder reliability, the analysis identifies distinct institutional portfolios. Specifically, the CoR predominantly emphasises environmental issues and locally implementable themes, the Council primarily addresses societal concerns, and the EP advances a cross‐cutting agenda that links environmental and socio‐economic instruments to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the European Green Deal. The paper further traces inter‐institutional references and shared narratives, revealing coordination gaps within EU MLG. From a methodological perspective, BERTopic is a topic‐modelling approach that combines transformer‐based language models with class‐based term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF‐IDF) to generate dense document clusters. This approach yields highly interpretable topics while preserving salient terms in topic descriptions, thereby significantly enhancing interpretability beyond simple word‐frequency techniques. Conceptually, the article situates EU sustainability framings within the broader literatures on governance and performance. Overall, the study contributes a reproducible mapping of sustainability across EU multilevel governance and derives implications for policy coherence, division of labour, and the early involvement of sub‐national actors. The article's added value lies in its integration of machine‐learning‐based analysis—specifically BERT‐based topic modelling—with a traditional expert‐driven analytical approach to EU multilevel governance, including policy analysis and examination of the
acquis communautaire
.
P. Blížkovský, L. Lacina, J. Přichystal et al.· Journal of Public Affairs· 0 citations
This article analyses the documentary institutional architecture of community social services in Spain through a comparative study of 15 autonomous communities, with particular attention to the formal conditions of institutional sustainability. Its aim is to examine how multilevel governance, digitalisation and institutional resilience are articulated in the regional configuration of the system. To this end, a documentary corpus was constructed from three official primary sources: regional social services laws, catalogues or portfolios of benefits and services, and current strategic plans or equivalent instruments. The findings suggest that, at the documentary level, territorial variation is not explained solely by the age of the framework law, but rather by the degree of institutional closure achieved among regulation, the specification of benefits and services, and strategic planning. Autonomous communities with a more complete law–catalogue–plan sequence display more consistent institutional architectures, whereas deficits in any of these links increase documentary and strategic fragmentation. Likewise, digitalisation appears uneven across territories, and its institutional usefulness depends on whether digital tools are integrated into shared information systems and accessible to both professionals and citizens. Institutional resilience is examined through documentary markers such as planning, evaluation, coordination, organisational learning and adaptation mechanisms. The article concludes that, from a documentary institutional perspective, community social services appear more robust when regulation, planning, digital tools and multilevel coordination are articulated in a coherent and stable way.
Javier Pacheco-Mangas, I. Estrada-Moreno, Ana Laura López-Carlassare et al.· The social science· 0 citations
The adoption of Open Government Data (OGD) by local governments is crucial for enhancing public sector transparency and accountability, principles central to United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goal 16 (Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions). This study undertakes a rigorous analysis of OGD initiatives, using the two available United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) assessment results, 2022 and 2024, using a mixed-method approach to interpret the evolution of digital governance. The research first com-bines two distinct quantitative data sources: the external expert assessments from the Local Online Services Index (LOSI), which measures policy commitment, and a longitudinal analysis of official self-assessment data from the Local Government Questionnaire (LGQ), which quantifies infrastructural fragmentation. This is complemented by a deep-dive into ten global cases, selected for their di-verse governance structures and histories of fragmented data release. The key results reveal a synchronized trend toward maturity. The LOSI assessment indicated a modest, sustained rise in OGD policy commitment (from 31% to 33%) and active data sharing (from 35% to 37%). Simultaneously, the LGQ survey, track-ing a fixed panel of 20 cities, documented a measurable reduction in infrastructure-al fragmentation. The number of cities providing multiple OGD portal URLs fell from 40% (8 cities) in 2022 to 30% (6 cities) in 2024. This decline is interpreted not as infrastructural contraction, but as a strategic and mature move toward plat-form consolidation. This rationalization is essential for developing a coherent urban data ecosystem by enhancing data governance and resource efficiency, ultimately improving data discoverability for smart city applications.
D. Sarantis, Delfina Soares, Deniz Susar et al.· EGOV-CeDEM-ePart 2026· 0 citations