Last month, IOI announced the inaugural grantees for the IOI Fund for Network Adoption. In this blogpost, we share what designing the Fund and reviewing over 100 applications from Africa, North America, and Latin America taught us about where the opportunities are, and where investment is most needed.
A process designed to identify readiness and community connection
We designed the Fund selection process to identify networks that are most genuinely ready: not just technically capable, but deeply connected to and trusted by their communities. A critical part of the process is building regional expertise at every step of review, because understanding community relationships and regional context requires reviewers with lived experience and first-hand knowledge of those landscapes.
The Fund’s 100+ pre-applications were each reviewed by three independent reviewers from our Community Advisory Panel, which included a majority of colleagues from the focal regions of the Fund. The Panel provided contextual expertise that proved invaluable in surfacing proposals that might have been undervalued through purely technical assessments, but that demonstrated strong strategic positioning and community trust within their regions.
We paired this knowledge with technical expertise. We constituted a Technical Advisory Panel whose remit was to assess proposals on whether their proposed solutions are sound and feasible. We also conducted reference checks with members and collaborators of the applying networks, gathering perspectives on governance and collaboration dynamics and community relationships. The combination enabled us to direct funding where it’s most needed, and to partners with the community trust and capacity to steward it effectively.
What we’re seeing: Critical investment opportunities
Several clear opportunities for investment emerged across the 100+ pre-applications:
- Building capacity beyond technology. Under-resourced institutions need more than technical infrastructure. They need skilled personnel (e.g. data stewards, system engineers), data literacy programs, and financial runway to test new platforms. Investments that address these interconnected capacity needs alongside technology can unlock adoption at scale.
- Connecting fragmented ecosystems. Every region has built valuable infrastructure, but much of it operates in silos: disconnected repositories, inconsistent metadata standards, and limited interoperability. There's substantial opportunity to increase research impact by making existing infrastructure work together more effectively, enabling researchers to discover resources, reuse datasets, and build collaborations across institutional boundaries.
- Strengthening sustainability thinking early. Many proposals articulated strong technical visions but deferred sustainability planning to later implementation phases. There's a significant opportunity to support networks in developing viable business models from the start — helping them think through who pays, why they would pay, and pricing and financing models that adapt to local economic realities. Early investment in sustainability planning can make the difference between infrastructure that thrives long-term and infrastructure that struggles after initial funding ends.
- Addressing governance and building trust. Complex legal frameworks around data sharing, fragmented policy landscapes, and sovereignty concerns represent fundamental questions about who controls research infrastructure, who benefits from it, and whether communities can trust it. Several proposals were explicitly building regional alternatives to address these concerns — important work that deserves support and can strengthen the entire ecosystem's legitimacy.
We also saw considerable regional expertise, established community relationships, and innovative network approaches to local contexts. Networks that might not appear "ready" by conventional metrics often had something more valuable: community trust and strategic positioning within their regions.
Sustainable infrastructure requires different approaches in different places, and there's no universal template. What works for a North American consortium might be entirely inappropriate for an African network. This is something we’re looking forward to continuing to learn as we move into strategic support with our funded networks.
Next steps
The IOI Fund for Network Adoption, supported by Wellcome, Digital Science, the Kahle Austin Foundation, Karger Publishers Foundation, Arcadia, EBSCO, and other private donors, provides multi-year funding paired with strategic support from the IOI team.
As Kaitlin Thaney, IOI's Executive Director, notes: “We keep hearing from communities that what they need is more than just funding — it's longer runways, strategic partnership, and support that could match the scale of their ambitions. The IOI Fund for Network Adoption is our response. These are our largest grants yet, paired with dynamic resourcing and dedicated strategic support embedded throughout. We're providing fractional staffing from our team of strategists working alongside local teams to increase capacity and impact. This funding may not solve everything, but combined with that partnership, we hope it moves networks more thoughtfully and sustainably toward ambitious multi-year goals.”
If your foundation or organization is interested in supporting open infrastructure adoption, whether in specific regions, around particular technologies, or focused on certain communities, we'd welcome a conversation. We have a current, detailed understanding of the landscape and a strong, global pool of networks ready for partnership. Please contact Emma Green, IOI’s Director of Development, at emma@investinopen.org.