Last week we shared a first look at the Catalog of Open Infrastructure Services (COIs), a prototype designed to provide insight for decision makers looking to invest or adopt open infrastructure solutions.
Over the coming weeks, we’ll be working to gather feedback on this initial release from the community, and further develop our plans to expand development of this work. We are also hosting two community information sessions January 12 where we’ll share more about our work to date, how we’re thinking of the work ahead, and soliciting your thoughts and questions.
We wanted to take a moment to reflect on some of the initial questions and comments we’ve received. We’ll continue to share our learnings as this work evolves, as well as releasing updates to our Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section and additional documentation (listed below).
Questions from the community
- How were projects prioritized and selected for inclusion at launch?
As we outlined in our October 2021 blog post, we have been developing a holistic and comprehensive framework for understanding open infrastructure based on the work of others in the space. In early November, we announced the 10 services we felt were in general alignment with the criteria we put forth as we understood them at the time, knowing we didn’t have the ability to select every service given our limited resources and aggressive timeline for release. Our intention was to attempt meaningful representation of the broad range of open infrastructure services in a viable prototype. Consistent with our commitment to fostering a healthier, more equitable and inclusive research ecosystem, we made an intentional effort to include services provided by organizations located outside the North American and European areas where possible.
At no point did we plan for this initial release to be comprehensive or exhaustive of all services in the open science space. Consistent with our iterative approach, our work in this prototype has been focused on validating our approach and methods of collecting, analyzing, and displaying the available information. We look forward to adding additional services in the future and improving on the information presented based on feedback from the community of funders, providers, service users, and other stakeholders. If you have feedback to share, we encourage you to email us at catalog@investinopen.org.
- How does COIs relate to other registries, assessment tools, and values and principles frameworks in the scholarly communication space?
As we’ve outlined previously, we’ve benefitted immeasurably in this work from the previous efforts to map the landscape of open infrastructure services, including the Mapping the Scholarly Communication Landscape 2019 Census and bibliographic scan, the Scholarly Communication Technology Catalogue (SComCAT), the list of Open Access Publishing Tools from the Radical Open Access Collective, and the 400+ Tools and Innovations in Scholarly Communication compiled by Jeroen Bosman and Bianca Kramer of Utrecht University Library. Our thanks to all who contributed to these resources and made them available for reuse.
We feel our contribution to these resources include the additional governance and financial information we provide in our description of the services, focusing on the manner in which the service is provided as well as the service itself. We also apply some simple evaluative frameworks assessing transformative influence and community engagement. We don’t seek to replace any of these valuable resources but instead supplement and augment the information already available with the details and insights we’ve come to understand through our research are valuable to various stakeholders for making informed decisions.
Join the conversation
We’re committed to sharing our work as openly as we can, and inviting community discourse and feedback. We’ll be hosting two informational sessions to explore more about our work behind the scenes to develop COIs, discuss our learnings so far, and answer your questions.
We hope you’ll join us! Participation is open; registration is required. Sessions will be recorded.
Additional reading
- Beyond open: Key criteria to assess open infrastructure. More on criteria we are tracking, designed to center community, reliability, and transformative influence in our analysis.
- Exploring costs & characteristics of open infrastructure providers. Details on the projects we've selected (and how we chose them) for a deep analysis, and our broader work to map the open infrastructure project landscape.
- Funding open infrastructure: an overview of initial work. The first in a series of posts on our initial findings from collecting and analyzing data on the funding of open infrastructure.
- Funding open infrastructure: key terms and concepts in our analysis. Key terms and a general discussion of the challenges in accessing funding data.