Duration: September 2024 - March 2025
Team: Kaitlin Thaney, Katherine Skinner, Jennifer Kemp, Emmy Tsang
Funder: Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
Skillset: Landscape Analysis, Ecosystem Intelligence
Overview
Research software underpins scholarly work across virtually every discipline, from the life sciences and physics to the social sciences and humanities. Over the past decade, the ecosystem supporting these disciplines has grown substantially, with more tools, platforms, registries, and community initiatives than ever before. That growth brings real opportunity, and it also raises a worthwhile question: how can the research software network develop in ways that make it more connected, more resilient, and more useful to the communities it serves?
The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation funded IOI to find out.
What we did
We came to this work with experience from the preprint infrastructure space where we had learned that thriving ecosystems don't happen organically. They require careful research, intentional conversations, and deliberate listening to the people invested in making them work.
We applied that same approach here. We combined desk research and a review of existing literature with our own interviews with representatives from 19 organisations working across research software infrastructure. The interviews weren't just a way to gather data: they were a chance to surface things people were thinking about but hadn't put in writing, to test what we were finding in the literature against what people were actually experiencing, and to identify where the real gaps and opportunities were.
We aimed to be thorough about the perspectives we sought out. That meant paying attention not just to the preeminent groups, but also to tools and services developed within and supported by communities that are typically underrepresented in research software.
What we found
The research software ecosystem has a lot of energy and genuine commitment behind it. It also has clear opportunities to become more coordinated, more visible, and more sustainable.
One of the most significant findings was a scarcity of available, standardized, and meaningful data about what is actually happening in the field. That information gap limits everyone's ability to make good decisions about where to invest and where to coordinate, and addressing it is one of the most valuable things the field can do collectively.
The recommendations that came out of our research reflect four areas where focused attention would make the most difference:
- Surface hidden information: The field needs time and attention dedicated to identifying and gathering the data that currently doesn't exist or isn't shared in consistent ways.
- Strengthen the scaffolding: As research software matures, the priority needs to shift from creating new things to integrating, maintaining, and enabling consolidation where it makes sense.
- Grow the market: Research software infrastructures are drawing on the same funding sources, and diversifying those sources is an important part of building long-term resilience. Understanding how users connect to the resources needed to keep infrastructure running is essential to building more sustainable models.
- Invest in coordination: No single actor can succeed alone in a field that is still developing its practices and market structures. Targeted philanthropic investment that creates time, space, and structured support for collaboration across the ecosystem is where the highest leverage lies.
The full findings are available in the project report. Key infrastructures identified through the research have also been added to Infra Finder, IOI's open infrastructure discovery tool.
Trying to understand a complex ecosystem?
Landscape analysis is most valuable when it goes beyond cataloguing what exists to surfacing what the ecosystem actually needs and where the real opportunities for coordination and investment are. That requires relationships across the field and the ability to ask questions that cut through to what people aren't yet saying out loud.
If you're a funder or infrastructure organisation trying to understand where your work fits in a larger system, we'd be glad to talk.
Project Outputs
Papers
- Skinner, K., Kemp, J., Thaney, K., & Tsang, E. (2025). The State of Open Research Software Infrastructure. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14888589
- Kemp, J., & Tsang, E. (2025). [IOI] Research Software Infrastructure Landscape Overview. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14886707
- Kemp, J., & Tsang, E. (2024). [IOI] Research Brief: Community Infrastructure to Further Open Research Software. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14178127
- Kemp, J., & Tsang, E. (2024). Interview Protocol - Research Software. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14141211
Blog Posts
- Read our research project announcement
- Sellanga, J., & Tsang, E. (2025). Charting a path towards a sustainable and resilient research software infrastructure ecosystem. https://investinopen.org/blog/charting-a-path-towards-a-sustainable-and-resilient-research-software-infrastructure-ecosystem/
Grant Proposal
- Thaney, K., & Skinner, K. (2024). Grant proposal: Community infrastructure to further open research software: A landscape analysis of needs, dependencies, and opportunities. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13961597
