Call for Proposals: IOI Fund for Network Adoption

This announcement is also available in Spanish, French, and Portuguese.

Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) is thrilled to announce today that the call for proposals for the IOI Fund for Network Adoption is open. Backed by Wellcome, Digital Science, the Kahle Austin Foundation, and another private philanthropy, this Fund aims to accelerate the collective adoption, implementation, and expansion of open data and content infrastructures to foster collaborative research in Africa, Latin America, and North America.

About the IOI Fund for Network Adoption

At IOI, our foremost goal is to increase the investment in and adoption of open infrastructure. Given the increasing resource scarcity, as evidenced by the funding cuts in the USA and other countries, progress towards this goal requires innovation and community participation.

Over the years, IOI has developed strong relationships globally with research networks, libraries, consortia, philanthropies, government funders and other stakeholders within the scholarly ecosystem to co-create impactful open solutions responsive to the emergent needs of our communities. Through these engagements and our research, we have identified several barriers to open infrastructure adoption and growth.

Fragmented funding efforts have resulted in misaligned investments, such as prioritizing innovation over essential maintenance and scaling of existing infrastructures. The lack of flexible, multi-year funding leads to operational challenges for those adopting and maintaining open infrastructure, because it hinders long-term strategic planning, making it difficult to retain skilled staff and restricting the ability to adapt to evolving user needs. This problem is compounded by a dependence on a limited pool of funders, leaving open infrastructure and its adopters vulnerable to funding shifts. The intersection of these challenges necessitated the development of a mechanism through which research networks can get the funding needed to adopt, improve, and scale their open infrastructure to create a thriving, collaborative research environment. 

Through the Fund, we aim to provide flexible, multi-year funding to enhance open data infrastructures' implementation, growth, and usability to advance scientific research. Data sharing is crucial to accelerating collaborative research in these regions and further global, equitable access to and participation in research.

The IOI Fund for Network Adoption is built on lessons learnt from the pilot Open Infrastructure Fund, which we launched in 2023. The Open Infrastructure Fund aimed to create a more collective, open, and transparent funding process in which we serve real community needs by centring the voices of those who are most impacted by/underrepresented in funding decision-making.

The IOI Fund for Network Adoption Fund is a continuation of our approach (at a larger scale) to supporting and working directly with local networks and communities to understand and centre their unique needs, supporting the development, implementation, and adaptation of open data infrastructure solutions that are tailored to their specific contexts. The Fund is a key initiative in this effort, providing crucial resources for strengthening shared infrastructures and enabling researchers to address pressing global issues more effectively. 

In addition to funding, awardees will also receive in-kind strategic advisory from the IOI team in relation to governance and sustainability modeling, community engagement and outreach, and technical infrastructure and integrations to help ensure the continuity and sustainability of the adoption/implementation of the open infrastructure beyond the life of the project.

How to Apply

The application process for the fund begins with a mandatory network readiness assessment that is aimed at providing an initial evaluation of the compatibility of the network with the criteria and aims of the Fund. If the assessment is positive, the applicant is encouraged to proceed to fill in the Pre-Application form, where they will submit a three-page summary of their proposed project. 

Office hours

In the next couple of weeks, we have scheduled office-hour sessions during which the IOI team will share more details about the Fund's objective, scope, application, and evaluation processes and answer community questions. 

We plan to host two repeated sessions. Both of the sessions will primarily be in English. However, there will be simultaneous interpretations in Spanish, French and Portuguese. The dates of the open office sessions are as listed below:

• Monday, March 10, 2025, 17:00 UTC (in your time zone): Register at this link
• Monday, March 17, 2023, 11:00 UTC (in your time zone): Register at this link

All sessions will be recorded, and we will share the recordings on our YouTube channel a day after each session. We look forward to meeting you at a session!

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

We have prepared a list of FAQs and their subsequent responses in relation to the Fund here. In case there is a question you have that is not listed, we encourage you to either attend the Office Hour sessions to learn more about the Fund or please email Emmy at emmy [at] investinopen [dot] org