Over the past year, we've watched critical US scientific datasets get deleted, defunded, and taken offline. Climate records from NOAA. Public health data from the CDC. Earth observation from NASA. Research collections that took decades and billions of dollars to build, now gone or at risk.
This isn't just an American problem. It's a warning for the world: when governments are the single point of access for irreplaceable scientific data, political shifts can cause permanent knowledge loss.
Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) has secured US$600,000 from Global Impact to support coordination and design efforts around these critical data preservation issues. This effort will explore coordinated, interoperable, and sustainable infrastructure solutions for protecting vital scientific knowledge — not just in response to current threats, but as a long-term solution against future risks globally. We will convene key players and initiatives, map the current landscape of rescue and archiving efforts, probe at key design questions regarding data availability and scale, and build an evidence-based investment case for coordinated open infrastructure that reduces our collective reliance on any single access point.
We're not starting from scratch. Important preservation work is already underway across the ecosystem, from the Internet Archive and Data Rescue Project to ICPSR/Data Lumos, EDGI, Dryad, Center for Open Science, source.coop, Filecoin, and many others. We aim to complement existing, decentralized data rescue efforts by identifying where and how coordination and sustainability planning can strengthen collective efforts.
The challenge is significant. We're talking about data at the scale of weather systems, earth observation, and national health surveillance, data that serves researchers, policymakers, and commercial interests alike. Solutions will need to address not just storage and archiving, but questions of data sovereignty (including non-US cloud options), metadata coordination across repositories, and access requirements that may exceed current open infrastructure capabilities.
This initial funding allows us to map the current landscape, identify where coordination, design, and sustainability support can strengthen existing efforts, and build the evidence-based case for the larger coordinated investment that is needed to support sustainability backup infrastructure at scale. Our goal is to be additive to the critical work that is already underway — helping organisations to coordinate their efforts and developing the frameworks that can secure long-term funding for resilient systems that ensure scientific data remains accessible
The stakes couldn't be higher. Scientific knowledge is irreplaceable, and the window for coordinated action is narrow. But with the right infrastructure, coordination, and investment, we can transform today's emergency response into tomorrow's resilient solution. If you’re working on data preservation, rescue, or infrastructure in this space, we want to hear from you. Contact us at research@investinopen.org to get involved.