Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) is excited to announce that it has received a $150,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to conduct a research study aimed at developing a comprehensive understanding of the current needs and dependencies in the research software ecosystem and uncovering future opportunities to advance its sustainability and resilience.
Why focus on research software?
Research software is a foundational element across a wide array of scholarly disciplines, including the life sciences, physics, social sciences, and humanities. Over the past decade, we have seen a significant increase in research software development activities, availability and discoverability. The ecosystem supporting research software has also expanded, with initiatives and organizations such as the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS), rOpenSci, pyOpenSci, and the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) providing critical services, including but are not limited to developing best practices, capacity building, and reviewing of open-source software. Platforms, repositories, and registries like GitHub, GitLab, Zenodo, and discipline-specific platforms such as the Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL) and bio.tools enhance the visibility and discoverability of research software. These community and operation infrastructures together provide support that is crucial for the growth of research software.
While these developments offer increased opportunities for collaboration and innovation, they also pose significant challenges. The very visibility and success of research software may increase the complexity and fragility of the ecosystem if tools and platforms proliferate without clear boundaries, differentiating features, and use cases. If growth leads to fragmentation, the duplication of efforts, splintering of attention, and complications in interoperability and standardization that follow could undermine the long-term collaborative energies that are critical for sustainability in the ecosystem.
Through our experience working with the preprint infrastructure community, including our landscape analysis and strategic support work with arXiv, bioRxiv, and medRxiv, we learnt that community and business/operations infrastructure lend a system view and consciousness to the ecosystem. A thriving ecosystem of tools, services, infrastructures, and people doesn’t happen organically. It can be enabled by careful research and listening, and intentional conversations with invested stakeholders, to identify critical gaps and needs and explore and test how the various components and players can best work together. We are excited to bring what we’ve learnt from the preprint space to add value to and learn from the research software ecosystem.
How IOI will go about the research
To build a comprehensive, shared understanding of the current state of the community and business/operations infrastructure for research software and its future potential, IOI will conduct a landscape analysis and needs assessment, focused on identifying:
- Existing connections between different infrastructure services and initiatives, and where new connections can be built to advance sustainability and resilience of the ecosystem;
- Areas in the ecosystem where there is overcrowding/excessive functional overlap, and where there are gaps, blockers, vulnerabilities, and/or critical dependencies that need addressing;
- Indications of what helps infrastructure services and initiatives succeed in adding value to the research software community.
Using a combination of desk research, stakeholder interviews, and analysis, IOI will build a strong understanding of what is most needed, feasible, and useful. This research study will build on IOI's previous work on preprint infrastructure and other landscape studies and resources, including the ReSA community landscape analysis, the Map of Open-Source Science, and the Open Scholarship Grassroots Community Networks. We will also focus on highlighting and examining the research software tools and services that are developed within and supported by underrepresented communities. This includes groups that are typically underrepresented in software as a whole, such as women, Black, Indigenous, and Latina/o/e communities, as well as those underrepresented in research software specifically, like scholars and developers in non-English speaking contexts and in lower and middle-income economies (LMIE).
We believe a study to better understand the key players, needs, and dependencies in the space would produce useful insight into where there are opportunities for increased collaboration, coordination, and shared support across efforts, with the aims of increasing the sustainability of key infrastructures, mitigating risks, and building towards more resilient models to ensure their future growth.
This research will be conducted over a five-month period and is expected to be finalized by the first quarter of 2025. We will share our findings through open-access briefs and reports, and are also working to add information on key infrastructures in the research software space to Infra Finder, our open infrastructure discovery tool.
We will be publishing regular updates on the progress of the research in the coming months. Subscribe to our newsletter to ensure you receive the updates from the IOI team! If you have any questions regarding this work, please contact research@investinopen.org.