Status: Completed

Team members: Saman Goudarzi

Description: Synthesizing the characteristics and dimensions of “scholarly infrastructure” and “open scholarly infrastructure” in literature towards a more sophisticated framework of understanding.

At Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI), one of our aims is to enhance our shared understanding of infrastructure in scientific research and scholarly communication. We believe that a more profound understanding of this area will have substantial consequences for how organizations providing research and scholarship services are supported and engaged with.

In this investigation, we examined a body of literature that includes works across the fields of anthropology, scholarly communications, international development studies, science and technology studies, and infrastructure studies. We synthesized the characteristics and dimensions defined in the literature we reviewed to produce the initial draft, which we then opened for public comments for two weeks. Our research team then synthesized the feedback from the community to create the final report that we hope gives more divergent perspectives that have enriched our understanding of open infrastructure in research and scholarship.

Research outputs & synthesis