Duration: December 2025 - April 2028 (30 months)
Team: Kaitlin Thaney, Katherine Skinner, Emma Green, Lauren Collister, Sarah Lippincott, Chrys Wu
Funder: Mellon Foundation
Skillset: Landscape Analysis, Convening / Facilitation
Overview
AI has created a new kind of demand for open collections. Repositories, preprint servers, libraries, and institutional archives are seeing a sharp rise in automated access, as AI developers draw on open content to train and refine their models. That activity reflects how valuable this content has become, both to the institutions that have invested in making it open and to the organizations building new products and services on top of it.
The infrastructure and norms for this relationship haven't caught up with its scale. Many collections are dealing with real strain: traffic spikes that drive up hosting costs, usage statistics that no longer reflect how content is actually being accessed, and access patterns that existing tools weren't built to handle. At the same time, the organizations building with this data are navigating real uncertainty of their own, about what they can use, how to credit it, and how to work with the people who maintain it.
Open collection providers, AI developers, publishers, and funders are each responding in their own ways, through technical changes, updated access policies, and direct conversations with each other. But these groups don't often have reason to be in the same room, and when they are, they tend to bring different incentives, different vocabularies, and sometimes directly competing interests. That's the gap BRIDGE is designed to close.
With support from the Mellon Foundation, IOI will be building partnership models that align open knowledge strategies and commercial demand.
What we’re doing
BRIDGE is built around one core premise: the organizations providing open knowledge collections and the organizations using that data, whether to train AI models or to build the products and services that depend on them, have more to gain from working through these questions together than apart.Right now, several areas are seeing a lot of activity. Open collections are trying to understand not just the operational impact of high-volume automated access, but the value of the data itself, and to whom that value matters. The field is still working out how to define different types of "bot usage" consistently. The legal and policy landscape around data use and attribution remains largely unclear. And there's growing interest, among open collection providers, AI developers, publishers, funders, and other stakeholders, in practical frameworks for working together that reflect what this new environment actually costs and creates.
IOI is deeply researching this landscape, conducting interviews, and pulling out the drivers that fuel decisions around the varied responses to the changes in business decisions and service operations because of AI. We're also leveraging the trust we have built with diverse stakeholder groups, bringing the right people together and creating the conditions for honest, productive conversations designed to drive toward co-created proposals that benefit open collections and AI development and use.Throughout this work, we'll be sharing our findings every step of the way. The ultimate outcome: workable solutions fit for purpose that can be built on as our new world of AI everywhere evolves.
Why IOI
Conversations at the intersection of open infrastructure, technology, and policy tend to fall apart without someone actively working to build trust across all sides, and that kind of trust doesn't come from a single project. IOI has spent years building relationships across philanthropies, research institutions, publishers, and industry players. That track record means we can bring together stakeholders who would otherwise struggle to reach each other, and create the conditions for honest conversation once they're in the room. BRIDGE is part of how we continue building that trust with groups across the ecosystem, work that will extend well past this project's timeline.
BRIDGE is also a chance to build something that doesn't exist yet: practical, reusable frameworks for how open knowledge providers, AI developers, publishers, funders, and other stakeholders can work together in ways that strengthen open collections.
Get involved
If you manage collections, develop AI tools, fund infrastructure, or work on the legal and policy questions this space is generating, BRIDGE is designed with you in mind. Reach out at research@investinopen.org to find out more about participating.
Project Outputs
Publications
- Lippincott, S., Collister, L., & Skinner, K. (2026). Sustaining the Commons in the AI Economy: A Landscape Scan of Challenges and Strategies for Bridging AI Companies and Open Curated Collections. Invest in Open Infrastructure. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19458128
Videos
- Invest in Open Infrastructure. (2026, April 28). Sustaining the commons in the AI economy - Roundtable discussion. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOqR2V_zBfM
- Blog post announcement: "Highlights from Sustaining the Commons in the AI Economy."
Blog Posts
- Invest in Open Infrastructure. (2025, December 8.) "BRIDGE: Exploring cross-sector partnerships in the AI-era."
- Collister, L., Lippincott, S., and Skinner, K. (2026, April 21.) "Sustaining the Commons in the AI Economy: A Landscape Scan of Challenges and Strategies for Bridging AI Companies and Open Curated Collections."
Grant Proposal
- Thaney, K., & Skinner, K. (2025). Grant Proposal: Building Resilient Infrastructure through Dialogue, Growth, and Exchange (BRIDGE). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17900695
