Duration: Published yearly
Team: Full IOI team, led by Gail Steinhart and Sarah Lippincott; Curtin Open Knowledge Initiative
Skillset: Landscape Analysis, Ecosystem Intelligence

Overview

The tools and systems that research depends on are largely invisible until something goes wrong. Repositories, publishing platforms, metadata standards, persistent identifiers: most researchers accept these as a given and don't think much about who funds them, who governs them, or what happens if their money runs out. IOI thinks about this constantly, and the State of Open Infrastructure report is how we share what we find.

Published annually, the report surfaces trends, patterns, and gaps in how open infrastructure is funded and adopted across the global research ecosystem. It's also where we flag what's changing, what's fragile, and where we think sustained attention is most needed.

Explore the State of Open Infrastructure 2025
Download the report

What we did

Each edition of the report combines original data collection and analysis with interviews across stakeholder groups, drawing on IOI's position across the ecosystem to ask questions that individual institutions or funders rarely have the vantage point to ask.

For the 2025 report, we analyzed more than $550 million in open infrastructure grant funding from 2001 to 2024, mapping where money has come from, which infrastructures have benefited, and what the research activity those investments enabled actually looks like. We examined the characteristics of open infrastructures listed in Infra Finder to understand how they relate to each other and where the ecosystem may be more fragile than it appears. We looked closely at the real costs of public access compliance, going beyond the policy itself to the technological, financial, and human factors that determine whether mandates translate into genuine openness.

We also asked a harder question: what happens to vital open infrastructures in a moment of serious funding volatility? Rather than ranking or comparing individual tools, we tried to surface the relationships between them, between infrastructures and the communities that depend on them, and between different stakeholder groups across geographies. That relational picture matters because disruption rarely stays contained. When tools depend on each other, a funding crisis in one place has consequences elsewhere.

The report also interrogates some of the language the field relies on. Terms like "open," "non-profit," and "sustainable" carry assumptions that shape funding decisions and partnership opportunities in ways that aren't always examined. The 2025 edition includes a dedicated section exploring how binary labels like "open vs. closed" can obscure more than they reveal, and what a more values-grounded way of thinking about infrastructure might look like.

What we found

The 2025 report arrived at a moment when the fragility of open infrastructure funding had become impossible to ignore. Government funding has been a critical source of support for open infrastructure globally, but the scale of recent research funding cuts in the United States and elsewhere has exposed how much of the ecosystem was built on foundations that seemed stable without actually being resilient.

Across the chapters, a few findings stand out.

On grand funding and returns on investment: 

  • Analysis of $550M+ in grants from 2001 to 2024 shows that open infrastructures generate strong returns relative to the direct support they receive, but that case is hard to make when the funding landscape is shifting faster than institutions can plan around. Many are taking a wait-and-see approach, which is understandable and also exactly the kind of collective hesitation that creates system-level risk. 

On infrastructure interdependence: 

  • The high degree of interdependence across open infrastructures is both a source of strength and a structural vulnerability. When tools depend on each other, a funding crisis in one place has consequences elsewhere.
  • North American infrastructures are more likely than those elsewhere to rely on program service revenue as their primary funding source. This model doesn't transfer evenly across regions and raises real questions about who controls access to knowledge and on whose terms.
  • What looks like a simple "open or closed" distinction is, on closer examination, a spectrum of practices that resists easy categorization.

On funding volatility and resilience: 

Funding is a widespread concern, but not all organizations face the same types or levels of threat. Specificity matters. Pooling data about infrastructure use with the kind of detailed characteristics IOI collects through Infra Finder could help identify which tools are best positioned to work more closely together, potentially reducing costs, increasing visibility, and building more resilient business models in a difficult funding climate.

Using the report

The State of Open Infrastructure reports are free to read and download, with all underlying datasets publicly available. Explore the State of Open Infrastructure or download the 2025 report now.

If you're working through what the findings mean for your organization, or if you'd like to talk about how IOI's analysis could inform your funding or adoption decisions, we'd be glad to hear from you.

Research outputs