Building a modular scholarly infrastructure like LEGO

A growing number of funders, institutions, and academics are advocating for sustainable, transparent, and trusted open scholarly infrastructures. While significant progress has been made in journal publishing, other essential research outputs, such as preprints, data, and software, still lack recognition and support, despite being integral to scholarly communication. This poster presents a modular vision for scholarly publishing infrastructure, inspired by both the distinct stages of the publishing process and the familiar LEGO brick metaphor. By developing interoperable components such as peer review systems, hosting platforms, metadata services, citation identifiers and persistent identifiers, we can create an infrastructure that is robust, user-centric, and future-ready. For non-profit university presses like TU Delft OPEN Publishing, this approach offers a strategic opportunity to reduce costs, ensure sustainability, advance open science, and strengthen collaboration with funders and institutions. Initiatives such as the NWO (Dutch Research Council) Research Infrastructure call and the Netherlands University Presses (NUP) collaboration demonstrate that many of the essential building blocks are already in place. The true innovation, therefore, is not (only) in building new tools from scratch, but also in effectively connecting the ones we already have in a modular, open, and sustainable way. This poster invites academics, publishers, funders, and infrastructure builders to co-create an interoperable scholarly ecosystem that brings all the pieces together.