Since October last year, the IOI team has been conducting research aimed at developing an understanding of the current needs and dependencies in the research software ecosystem and uncovering future opportunities to advance its sustainability and resilience. This research, sponsored by the Sloan Foundation, aimed at understanding factors that might help the research software ecosystem to thrive and sustainably develop. In this work, we sought to identify:

  • Existing connections in the research software infrastructure ecosystem and where new connections can be built to advance sustainability and resilience.
  • Areas in the ecosystem where there is overcrowding and where there are gaps, blockers, vulnerabilities, and/or critical dependencies that need to be addressed.
  • Indications of what helps infrastructure services and initiatives succeed in adding value to the research software ecosystem.

Methodology

We combined desk research with community interviews. The IOI research team interviewed representatives from 19 organizations in the research software infrastructure field. The interviews served to validate, interrogate, correct, and/or round out information gathered from desk research. They also sought to surface things that people may be thinking about but not sharing openly in writing or elsewhere.

Key recommendations

  • Surface hidden information - One of the biggest challenges we discovered during the study is a scarcity of available, standardized, and meaningful data. This information gap limits the visibility of what is happening in research software and in the development of infrastructure to support it. There is a pressing need to give time and attention at the field level to identify and subsequently gather the needed data to fill the information gaps.
  • Strengthen the scaffolding - As the field matures, its actors need stronger scaffolding to support norms and activities. Scaffolding, in this instance, can be defined as elements that, with appropriate instantiation, might become the backbone (social, technical, administrative) infrastructure supporting the field. There is a need to shift the priority from creating to integrating and maintaining, and to encourage and enable consolidation, specialization, mergers, and handoffs. 
  • Grow the market - One of the challenges we have noticed is that research software infrastructures are leaning on the same funding sources, and those funding sources may not last. We've seen this in other fields as well. There is a need to figure out how to identify the research software users and how those users connect to customers. Understanding how that user connects to the dollars necessary to keep the research infrastructures running is also essential. This is not about profit but keeping things running and having a dependable system.
  • Invest in coordination - Research software is still in its infancy and lacks well-established practices, scaffolding, and market structures. With these conditions, no single actor can succeed alone in this evolving field, especially amid today's challenging fiscal and political landscape for open science. Philanthropic funders can step in with targeted investments that build the foundational architecture of research software infrastructure. Such investments would bolster individual projects, programs, and organizations and create the necessary environment — providing time, space, tools, and structured support — for key stakeholders (across training, packaging, hosting, socialization, and advocacy) to collaborate across disciplines and geographies.
Read the full report

Next Steps

We invite you to explore Infra Finder, our open infrastructure discovery tool, to discover some of the available key open research infrastructure software. We are continually looking to add infrastructures to Infra Finder to make it easier for people to find open infrastructures that can be used within their unique contexts. If you are an open infrastructure service, you can also express your interest in being added to Infra Finder via this form. Subscribe to our newsletter to ensure you receive the updates from the IOI team! If you have any questions regarding this work, please get in touch with research@investinopen.org

Posted by Jerry Sellanga & Emmy Tsang