Our Approach
Data Room tools empowering decision makers
Through actionable insights — provided via reports, dashboards, and Infra Finder, our tool for discovering and assessing open infrastructure services — we enable stakeholders to make informed, strategic investments in open infrastructure.
Strategic Support tailored application of research
Through targeted engagements, we partner with key players across sectors — funders, institutions, libraries, consortia, open infrastructures, commercial entities, and others — to implement the latest research to grow open infrastructure adoption and strengthen the sustainability and resilience of the global knowledge ecosystem.
Funding Pilots catalysing investments
Our research-driven funding pilots offer unique opportunities to invest in innovative funding models for open infrastructure. These pilots focus on catalysing deeper, more dynamic investments in advancing the adoption and resilience of open infrastructures in research and scholarship.
IOI sits at the intersection of a number of stakeholder communities — including funding bodies, libraries, service providers, and the research community, among others — united in a shared belief that digital infrastructure is critical to advancing open research and innovation and to addressing global challenges in sectors such as climate, health, and agriculture.
Increasing investment in and adoption ofopen infrastructure for research and scholarship.
The three core programmes build on our current strategic plan, which outlines our goals and objectives for FY2024-2027. Please see our brochure for an introduction to our work.
What is Open Infrastructure?Defining
Open Infrastucture
At IOI, we define open infrastructure as the shared research infrastructures needed to support open science and serve the needs of its full spectrum of stakeholders. As described in the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science, open infrastructures include “both virtual or physical, including major scientific equipment or sets of instruments, knowledge-based resources such as collections, journals and open access publication platforms, repositories, archives and scientific data, current research information systems, open bibliometrics and scientometrics systems for assessing and analyzing scientific domains, open computational and data manipulation service infrastructures that enable collaborative and multidisciplinary data analysis and digital infrastructures”.
Our focus is on the narrower set of open-source solutions, systems, and supports that facilitate the creation and dissemination of open content and data and empower communities to deliver new, improved collective benefits without restrictions to participation, engagement, or usage. These solutions are open source by design and often the result of community-driven efforts. They employ open standards, interact and interoperate with other open services, and are shaped by community needs.
History of IOI
Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) arose as a concept and coalition from the 2018 Joint Roadmap for Open Science Tools (JROST) conference, held in Berkeley, CA. That event brought together over 86 participants from over 50 organizations in the open research sector, including developers, institutional leaders, publishers, and funders.
Between August 2018 and March 2020, IOI existed solely as a volunteer effort, led by a 20-person Steering Committee of leaders in this sector.
In late 2019, the effort secured initial funding from Schmidt Futures and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and was established as a fiscally sponsored project of Code for Science & Society (CS&S), a leading 501(c)3 supporting the public interest technology space. IOI’s inaugural Executive Director (Kaitlin Thaney) was hired in March 2020.
Read more about our organizational history, staff, governance, and funding here in our Orientation Packet (updated annually).