This announcement is also available in Spanish.
Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) is delighted to announce that LA Referencia and UbuntuNet Alliance for Research and Education Networking are the inaugural grantees of the IOI Fund for Network Adoption. Selected from over 100 applications from 22 countries, the proposals from these two networks are ambitious, disruptive, and provide localized solutions to challenges in the open research ecosystem in Africa and Latin America.
LA Referencia and UbuntuNet Alliance will each receive up to US$1.5M in funding over the next two to three years to advance the adoption of open infrastructure and strengthen regional research ecosystems. Beyond funding, IOI staff will also provide ongoing implementation support to these project teams to bolster and enhance their governance, community engagement, financial and business models, ensuring the resilience and long-term impact of these networks.
Grantee networks and projects
LA Referencia will expand and improve its shared research platform across Latin America so that scientific work from the region can be more easily shared, preserved and discovered globally. LA Referencia operates a regional aggregation and discovery platform that currently connects 10 countries, collecting and preserving research information from national repositories in each member country. Key elements of the proposed project include:
- Expand services to include 10 additional Latin American countries, fostering new memberships and strengthening a more inclusive and equitable regional network.
- Upgrade the platform with new capabilities, including:
- An AI-powered multilingual semantic search system capable of discovering research across languages and connecting scholarly work beyond linguistic barriers, combined with advanced metadata enrichment to enable new metrics and more transparent and diverse approaches to research assessment across the region.
- Implementing a decentralized persistent identifier system (dARK) — based on blockchain technology and already working in IBICT (Brazil) — to ensure that research outputs and metadata remain permanently accessible and verifiable, even in the event of local system failures.
- Create a regional Dataverse repository for orphan datasets.
- Expand training programs and translate documentation to help more institutions use Dataverse effectively.
UbuntuNet Alliance connects over 840 institutions across 16 Eastern and Southern African countries. The support from the Fund and IOI will expand open access to African scholarship through five interconnected initiatives:
- Through its member National Research and Education Networks, roll out DSpace as a managed cloud service (DSaaS), giving research institutions easy access to repository services.
- Train over 560 librarians as repository managers and metadata librarians to create or strengthen more than 400 open institutional repositories.
- Enhance AfricArXiv’s functionality and utility as a pan-African aggregator solution for open research metadata, increasing the visibility of African research in the global commons.
- Upgrade and customize Dataverse integration with AfricaArXiv to build more robust data sharing capacity and discoverability, building on OpenAIRE and COARNotify integrations.
- Train over 450 data management champions (librarians and researchers) to support the creation and curation of open datasets, to produce over 960 curated open datasets that can be cited, discovered, and reused by researchers and policymakers worldwide.
This project directly addresses the North–South knowledge divide, ensuring African scholarship is visible, valued, and verifiable.
Why networks?
One of the unique features of the Fund is its focus on networks as key drivers for scaling open infrastructure globally, such as National and Regional Research and Education Networks (NRENs/RRENs) and networks of institutions such as consortia. Networks hold deep trust within research communities and create a multiplier effect, accelerating access to technology, training, and knowledge across institutions and borders.
The selection of LA Referencia and UbuntuNet Alliance aligns with IOI’s vision of leveraging networks to expand the adoption of open infrastructure. The location of these networks in the Southern Hemisphere will increase South-South research collaborations and enhance the sharing of information, technology, and resources.
"We built the IOI fund based on deep engagement with research communities — listening to where the need was greatest, understanding what conditions could catalyze infrastructure adoption, and identifying projects that were both critical and chronically underfunded,” said Kaitlin Thaney, Executive Director of IOI. “The scale of what's possible here is significant: over 1,300 research institutions across 36 countries. That's thousands of researchers gaining access to open infrastructure, new collaborations forming across continents, and proven models for sustainable support taking root in communities that need them most.”
The Fund contributors
Backed by the generous support of Wellcome, Digital Science, the Kahle Austin Foundation, Karger Publishers Foundation, Arcadia, EBSCO, and other private donors, the Fund aims to accelerate the global adoption of open data and knowledge sharing infrastructures, enabling more equitable and collaborative research worldwide.
“We must ensure funding reaches the communities building the infrastructure that researchers depend on every day if we’re to achieve equitable research ecosystems enabling high-quality research that has local, regional and global impact. The IOI Fund is designed to resource these communities at a scale they deserve.” remarked Hannah Hope, Open Research Lead, Wellcome. “These projects are fantastic examples of how we can grow impact by building national repositories, expanding knowledge sharing, and empowering communities to design and lead on solutions, ultimately helping us to overcome urgent health challenges.”
Funding and strategic support, integrated
In addition to financial support, IOI staff will provide hands-on implementation and strategic support for governance development, sustainability modeling, and funding diversification to ensure long-term impact and resilience.
IOI has developed extensive expertise over the years working with research funders, open infrastructure service providers, and library consortia in areas like sustainability and business modeling, governance structure design, and funder diversification strategies. This tailored support will be provided in parallel with the funding over the next three years, helping both networks optimize their long-term project impact.
What’s next
Both projects will commence in early 2026, and the IOI team is excited to collaborate with these networks to bring their ambitious project proposals to fruition. We fully believe in the transformative potential of the two proposals and are looking forward to sharing insights from the implementation process with our community.
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