The Catalog of Open Infrastructure Services (COIs) is a step towards addressing the information asymmetries that exist in understanding and assessing open infrastructure projects. This effort is designed to model a means of standardizing information about core open infrastructure services for decision makers and members of the community.

What's included

The catalog currently includes the following 10 open infrastructure services:

These 10 services were selected based on a range of service-specific criteria such as the type of service provided, the organizational status of the service provider, and the availability and accessibility of funding information. Other factors considered were the diversity of scholarly practices represented or the demonstration of the intention and ability to create change towards our vision of an equitable, just, and accessible infrastructure for all. We have previously documented this selection process including key criteria in more detail in this blog post.

Documentation

The initial prototype of COIs was developed as part of the Costs of Open Infrastructure research project. For more information on COI's data sources, a list of frequently asked questions, and additional discussion, please read the COIs documentation.

Documentation | Informational sessions recap | Initial feedback and learnings

Next steps

As we explore expanding COIs, our intention is to refine the value proposition for funders, providers, and other key stakeholders in order to design more efficient processes to gather, verify, and display information while keeping existing information up-to-date and expanding the information available to better serve the needs of those using COIs.

To this end, we ran an interest survey between May and June 2022 for open infrastructure service providers who are interested in being added to the next release of COIs – more details in this blog post. We are analysing the results of the survey and aim to release a next version of COIs towards the end of 2022.

Next steps | Q&A sessions recap

Between August and September 2022, we also interviewed 12 representatives from philanthropic funders, academic institutions, and research networks to understand how funding decisions are made and identify the opportunities for COIs to be integrated into that process, to help make some steps easier and/or more transparent.

Presentation on the preliminary results from this research (at our 2022 Funders Summit): recording, slides  

Acknowledgements

COIs was developed as a collaboration with open infrastructure project leaders, design support from Allison McCartney, and with input from institutional leaders, funders, and experts in non-profit effectiveness and assessment.

We also are especially grateful for the colleagues involved with (and their research) the Mapping the Scholarly Communication Landscape 2019 Census and bibliographic scan, the Scholarly Communication Technology Catalogue (SComCAT), the list of Open Access Publishing Tools from the Radical Open Access Collective, the Values & Principles Framework and Assessment Checklist from the Next Generation Library Publishing Project, the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure, and the 400+ Tools and Innovations in Scholarly Communication compiled by Jeroen Bosman and Bianca Kramer of Utrecht University Library. These resources have been foundational inspirations and supports for our investigations.

Our sincere thanks to all who shared their time, resources, and expertise with us.

Posted by Invest In Open Infrastructure