Status: Ongoing
Project Duration: October 2025 - January 2026
Team members: Katherine Skinner, Gail Steinhart , Sarah Lippincott, Lauren Collister, Chrys Wu

Overview

Open infrastructures (OIs) serving the academic and research communities operate within a variety of organizational and business forms. From Infra Finder data, we know that these organizational forms can include such setups as:  hosted academic programs (e.g., LOCKSS, arXiv, Knowledge Commons) those that are hosted and supported as part of a university; free-standing, not-for profit organizations (e.g., COAR, DOAJ, Islandora); for-profit endeavors (Atmire, Archivematica, RSpace); fiscal hosting models (CS&S, Open Source Collective, LYRASIS, OAPEN, OPERAS-EU); and purely volunteer ventures with no official organizational home or identity (e.g., OAI-PMH, ARK, Blacklight). Finding the right match to support an OI’s organizational mission, vision, and goals is an ongoing challenge that can traverse sector boundaries and geolocations. Where and how an entity is organizationally defined enables and forecloses a host of legal options and actions, from the ability to host a bank account and take in revenues to the right to sign a contract or make an agreement.

This topic has been one of interest in IOI’s strategic support work (e.g., “Exploring Organizational Models” and “Organizational Pathways,” both produced for arXiv). In 2025, interest in this topic has quickly grown, whether from changes in priorities or pressures from national and international developments . Understanding what different business forms, hosting models, and geopolitical choices entail and what risks they might help to mitigate for OIs is an active quest and set of work for many entities in the research ecosystem today. 

IOI will undertake a narrowly scoped landscape scan to understand the views from OI players that are changing, or have recently changed, their organizational home, focusing especially on those shifting or broadening their organizational footprint across geopolitical boundaries. We will document how current pressure points are changing the constellation of players involved in hosting OIs and affecting their strategies for sustainability.