Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) is thrilled to announce the launch of our latest resource: Infra Finder. This tool is designed to be the go-to resource for anyone navigating the complex landscape of infrastructure services and standards enabling open research and scholarship. 

Explore Infra Finder

Unveiling Infra Finder: Discover 57 infrastructure services and standards

Infra Finder currently offers a database that features a wealth of information about 57 infrastructure services and standards that showcase the variety in open practices that enable the open sharing of research data and publications. (And we are working with the community to include more! Please see “How can I add an infrastructure service” below.)

From repository software to persistent identifiers, Infra Finder provides information on services’ technical attributes, community engagement mechanisms, governance, key policies, and more – to help you discover and identify the infrastructure services that fit your and your institution’s requirements.

Who Does Infra Finder Cater To?

You might be interested in Infra Finder if you are:

  • Someone with a set of technologies in mind, and seeking a single source of information to obtain the details needed to make an informed decision.
  • Someone with a specific need but no particular technologies in mind – Infra Finder provides you with filterable options to explore and helps you discover the best fit for your requirements.

We are continuously exploring new use cases for Infra Finder as we learn from the community’s feedback.

Making Informed Choices

We understand the challenges institutional leaders face when navigating the vast sea of technology options. Infra Finder aspires to be the trusted source of information and a key reference for institutions, aiding you in making informed choices that advance your institution’s vision for open research and scholarship.

To this end, Infra Finder saves you time and enables you to make informed choices by:

  • Providing up-to-date, verified information: IOI works closely with infrastructure service providers to keep Infra Finder up to date, and has developed a robust process for verifying the data in Infra Finder.
  • Key information in a centralized location: we recognize that institutions and stakeholders have different requirements and considerations for adopting infrastructure services — Infra Finder showcases extensive information on the most common areas of consideration in one place.
  • Offering an easy-to-use comparison view: with Infra Finder’s user-friendly comparison view, you can compare up to four infrastructure services side-by-side, complete with links to more detailed information. 
An inforgraphic on Infra Finder's key features. The text in the graphic is a copy of the text in the bullet points above.

Your Feedback Matters

Infra Finder would not, and will not, exist without the community of infrastructure service providers and users who contribute to its development. In developing this first Infra Finder release, the IOI team has conversed with over 40 institutional budget holders and 26 infrastructure service providers in one-on-one meetings, focus groups, and user testing sessions. Their feedback and input have been critical and invaluable, from refining the data collection instrument, to improving the user experience of Infra Finder (find out more from our documentation).

This release of Infra Finder is just the beginning. We are eager to hear your thoughts and insights. Your feedback will play a crucial role in enhancing both the information available on the platform and the overall user experience.

Explore Infra Finder

Please use the feedback form to submit your feedback, suggestions for improvements and additional features. 

We will also be running two informational sessions to demo Infra Finder and to hear your thoughts and feedback. Please use the links below to register to participate:

These sessions will be recorded, and we will share the recordings here on our website within a week after the sessions.

Over the next few months, our team members will also be participating in conferences and events, both virtual and in-person, to demonstrate Infra Finder and get more feedback. We will be at:

How can I add an infrastructure service?

We believe that Infra Finder’s value with grow with the inclusion of more infrastructure services and standards. Please view this page for more information on how you can express interest in adding your infrastructure service to Infra Finder.

I need additional information and support to discover and evaluate infrastructure services 

If you are looking to grow your institution’s or network’s use of and investment in open infrastructure, IOI can provide targeted research and recommendations, including discovery, due diligence, and collecting stakeholder feedback to inform the adoption and implementation of open infrastructure solutions. 

Find out more about our strategic support program

FAQ

Below, we’ve selected a list of the most frequently asked questions (FAQs). For a full list of FAQs, please see our documentation. 

  • How did you choose the first group of services to be included in Infra Finder?
    For the current release, we decided to focus on infrastructure services enabling the sharing of research data and publications. This is a shared focus across all of our current core programmes of work. It allows us to better align our research, community engagement, and strategic support efforts. We see increasing the visibility of infrastructure services in this area and advancing their adoption as key to furthering the aims of policies including the Nelson memo in the US and UNESCO’s Recommendation on Open Science. Within this focus, we invited 84 service providers to participate. Some of these 84 services expressed interest in being part of the tool, and others we are engaging with through ongoing research efforts (e.g. the “reasonable costs” project). Out of the 84 providers, we received responses from 57 services. This is just the beginning – we will continue to add more infrastructure services to Infra Finder. If you are interested in adding your infrastructure service to Infra Finder, please see this page for more information.

  • How does Infra Finder relate to other registries, assessment tools, and values and principles frameworks in the scholarly communication and research data space?
    Infra Finder is built on previous and current efforts to map and bring visibility to the landscape of infrastructure services and technologies for research and scholarship. It was also heavily inspired by existing registries and values and principles frameworks in the space. These efforts include the Scholarly Communication Technology Catalogue (SComCAT), the Principles of Open Scholarship Infrastructure (POSI), the FOREST framework, re3data, fairsharing.org, the EOSC marketplace, and many others. We are grateful to all who have contributed to these resources. In creating Infra Finder, we chose to take a solutions-oriented, user-driven approach to increase the adoption of open infrastructure in a scalable way. For more about this approach, please refer to our documentation on Infra Finder’s background.

  • How do you define open infrastructure?
    We recognize that open infrastructure is a spectrum, rather than a binary. Your service may be eligible for inclusion in Infra Finder if it is in active use as a service, protocol, standard or software that the academic ecosystem needs in order to perform its functions throughout the research lifecycle. We are currently prioritizing services that meet one or more of the following criteria:
    • Meets the definition of open source software (OSS);
    • Primarily or exclusively distributes openly licensed (open access) content;
    • Is free to use by anyone (free of charge or other restrictions);
    • Is community-governed and is transparent in its operations and finances;
    • Is operated by a non-profit or non-commercial entity.

  • How do you envision Infra Finder to serve a global community of open infrastructure providers and adopters?
    We want Infra Finder to be useful to a global community of open infrastructure adopters, and aspire for it to highlight more open infrastructure services, especially those developed by teams outside of Europe and North America. Through our research and engagement, we understood that adopters (even within the same region) have diverse priorities and considerations in choosing an infrastructure. We also heard from infrastructure services in regions outside of North America and Europe that meaningful descriptors of aspects like funding sources and business or ownership models may look very different from what we currently present. We have invited and featured a number of infrastructures from Africa and Latin America in the initial release of Infra Finder, with the aim to test and learn how we can improve Infra Finder’s utility for stakeholders from these regions. Following the launch, we look forward to having intentional conversations with stakeholders worldwide to hear your feedback and experience, and understand how Infra Finder can better serve the global community. 

  • Additional questions?
    Please email us at infra-finder [at] investinopen [dot] org — we’d love to hear from you! If you’d like to stay updated on the latest on Infra Finder and other IOI projects, please subscribe to our newsletter.
Posted by Chrys Wu, Lauren Collister and Emmy Tsang