Status: Completed
Project Duration: July 2025 - September 2025
Team members: Sarah Lippincott, Katherine Skinner, Lauren Collister, Chrys Wu

Overview

Funding for open infrastructure (OI) in scholarly communication and open science is often fragmented, project-based, and institutionally siloed, discouraging long-term planning and shared responsibility. Library consortia represent a critical force in the open infrastructure ecosystem, serving as bridges between diverse institutional stakeholders and as potential catalysts for coordinated investment.

The ORBIT project investigated recent strategic thinking and activity among US-based academic library consortia regarding their investment in and adoption of open infrastructure. Through analysis of strategic plans and interviews with 15 consortium leaders, IOI identified areas of alignment, activity, and opportunity for collective action in support of open scholarly infrastructure. This work advances IOI's broader mission to facilitate sustainable, community-led infrastructure for open knowledge by examining how consortia can leverage their unique position as conveners and capacity-builders to strengthen the open infrastructure ecosystem.

The research reveals five strategic pathways where consortia are making collective impact—hosting, building, sponsoring, training, and cultivating—and documents the emergence of a "network of networks" model where consortia specialize in their strengths while collaborating for greater resilience and scale.

Project Outputs

Report

  • Lippincott, S., Skinner, K., Collister, L., & Wu, C. (2025). Open resilience: Building infrastructure together (ORBIT) landscape scan. Invest in Open Infrastructure. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17193778

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