In response, Proyecto ARPHAI sought to develop a project to accelerate and promote the ethical use of digitized health records nationwide. Led by CIECTI (the Interdisciplinary Centre for Science, Technology, and Innovation Studies), ARPHAI researches tools based on artificial intelligence and data science that can be applied to electronic medical records. By strengthening both the analytical value of health records and the technical and human capacity to work with health data, ARPHAI contributes to earlier detection of epidemic outbreaks and supports more timely, preventive public health decision-making.

Collaboration with IOI

In 2023, IOI opened the call for proposals for the Open Infrastructure Fund, which aimed to support the development of open research infrastructure services to strengthen sustainability, resilience, and adoption of open infrastructure. Proyecto ARPHAI was selected as one of the eight grantees of the fund, receiving funding of around US$18,000 to develop and sustain the infrastructure for processing and storing sensitive data from electronic health records in Argentina.

Implementation and Impact

The one-and-a-half-year project, which commenced in March 2024, was implemented in collaboration with the Centro de Computación de Alto Desempeño (CCAD), a high-performance computing facility at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (UNC), Argentina. A key deliverable was the acquisition of a high-capacity 'fatnode' server — affectionately nicknamed Gordito (Spanish for 'chubby') — equipped with 1 terabyte of RAM and support for 8 next-generation GPUs. The hardware provides the core computing infrastructure required to host and process electronic health records in a secure environment. The servers will support data storage, analysis, and the development of artificial intelligence models, enabling researchers to work with sensitive health data while maintaining responsible data governance. The server runs within CCAD's Kubernetes Cluster, hosting both Project Jupyter tools for interactive computing and Ollama for running large language models. The additional computing capacity has also benefited the broader teaching and research community at CCAD, extending its value well beyond health data applications.

“This server is a key piece for the JupyterHub at CCAD, which was recently inaugurated, because it is the one that makes it possible to run notebooks with one terabyte of RAM and up to four GPUs, providing computing power for the largest projects. The facility has also been a big boost for our wider research community at CCAD as we now have more computing power available even for researchers in other areas beyond healthcare,” commented Nicolás Wolovick, Director of CCAD.

To ensure that sensitive data stored on national servers yields actionable policy insights, the ARPHAI team organized two training sessions for government health officials in May and July 2025. These interactive sessions gave officials a solid foundation for working with sensitive electronic health data and for leveraging insights derived for the public good. Extensive documentation and training materials in Spanish were developed and made freely available to the Argentine research community under CC-BY licences, hosted on both the ARPHAI repository and Zenodo.

The importance of using local servers when dealing with a population’s health data is key to ensuring digital sovereignty and the protection of personal data, and strengthens states’ ability to manage data autonomously and in line with public interest objectives.

“It was a great pleasure for us to share our experience and help pave the way for those who face the daily challenge of working with sensitive data. It was doubly rewarding, not only because of the interest and feedback generated by the training, but also because it was an achievement in itself to get people so busy with the demands of daily management to take a moment to reflect on and analyze the impact of their work and their approach to it. Today, in a context where science funding faces significant challenges (particularly in countries like Argentina), these kinds of initiatives are especially valuable, as they contribute to sustaining and strengthening established research groups with demonstrated expertise and ongoing activity,” remarked Sabrina Lopez from Proyecto ARPHAI.

Lessons Learnt

Technical investment must be matched by human investment. The project design accounted not only for hardware but also for the capacity building needed to ensure long-term sustainability. Projects that focus solely on the technical side often face sustainability challenges. Community buy-in and well-trained personnel are equally critical to success.

The importance of partnerships in funding and sustaining open infrastructure. In recent years, funding for the science and education sector in Argentina has been cut. This, in turn, has created a massive financial deficit. From the project, we can see exemplary collaboration between different stakeholders (universities, research organizations, infrastructure services, and non-profits) to work together for the common good by pooling resources, which needs to be emulated.

ARPHAI's vision was realized through its partnership with CCAD, not in isolation. CCAD hosts the project’s infrastructure and data and supports the development of an active community of practice. CCAD had supported ARPHAI's research for two years before the IOI funding was secured — a testament to the importance of cultivating strong, mutually beneficial relationships in advancing societal impact.

Embed, don't impose. Infrastructure investments are more likely to see organic adoption when they flow through organizations and networks already embedded in their communities. These organizations bring the trust and contextual understanding that funders can't manufacture — they know what to build, for whom, and why it will actually get used.

Conclusion

Proyecto ARPHAI demonstrates what becomes possible when technical ambition is matched by the right partnerships, development of human capacity, and a commitment to openness. The challenge now is to scale this model to ensure that other sectors beyond healthcare can leverage open infrastructure for broader, sustained impact.

IOI's Director of Development, Emma Green led the engagement, working with 2i2c's Business Development Manager, Jim Colliander, and supported by Chrys Wu, Solutions Strategist at IOI. Jim reflected on what the partnership looked like in practice, what it made possible, and the key takeaways from the engagement. Below are some highlights.

When IOI first began working with 2i2c, what were the most urgent business or growth challenges you were trying to solve, and how were those affecting your ability to operate sustainably?

Jim: The core challenge was straightforward but not easy: we needed a credible path to organizational sustainability. Since 2i2c’s formation in 2020, we have built an initial base of recurring revenue. However, much of that recurring revenue had been secured through founders' networks and warm referrals; a pattern the team recognized as unsustainable. 

At the same time, we were navigating a significant internal transition. In early 2025, we moved from offering a managed JupyterHub service to a membership model, partly to make the full range of value we provide more explicit. That shift raised harder questions about what kind of organization we actually wanted to be. Some of the team saw our path to scale as becoming more like a SaaS product. Others felt it required more consultancy-style, bespoke engagement. IOI helped us work through that tension and arrive at a shared definition of what scaling actually means for 2i2c — which turned out to be important for our next steps.

What key assumptions about your role and approach to market, pricing, or go-to-market approach did IOI help you test or rethink, and which of those turned out to be the most important?

Jim: IOI guided 2i2c to take a more hypothesis-driven approach to go-to-market strategy, starting with identifying a key assumption that 2i2c had made: that 2i2c could successfully sell directly to Premier-tier customers through cold outreach. IOI helped us think about go-to-market with improved terminology and a scientific approach that centers user needs through user discovery processes.

What we discovered surprised us. Customers were not only seeking access to hubs. They were looking for genuine engagement with the 2i2c team, connections to other 2i2c communities, and a sense of participation in something larger.

On a personal level, the engagement also shifted my perception of my role. I had been conflating three distinct functions: the Farmer (focused on retention and expansion), the Hunter (focused on net new sales), and the Business Development Lead (focused on strategy and building growth systems). Recognizing which hat I was wearing at any given moment changed how I thought about scaling sales.

How did IOI’s engagement influence conversations/enhance alignment between business development, product, and engineering within 2i2c?

Jim: We discovered that we had real internal misalignment — not just on strategic direction, but on how commitments from the sales side were being translated into scoped work for product and engineering, and on how customer feedback was feeding back into what we built.

IOI recommended a recurring customer insights meeting that brings together business development, product, and delivery teams to create a structured cross-functional feedback loop. This has been implemented and we are already seeing improvements in the business-to-product feedback loop within 2i2c. IOI introduced and documented sales ceremonies. We now have a daily Business Development standup, a bi-weekly business strategy meeting, and a weekly engagement meeting. IOI’s Emma joined some of 2i2c’s BD meetings near the end of the engagement to provide real-time coaching and follow-up guidance.

Can you describe a concrete change in how 2i2c now approaches the BD role, sales, partnerships, or product design that grew directly out of this coaching and advisory work?

Jim: IOI helped us develop clear written role definitions distinguishing the Account Manager function from the Business Development Lead function. That clarity reduced some friction.

We also adopted a SAM/TAM horizon framework — mapping our Serviceable and Total Addressable Markets across a three-horizon planning timeline — which shifted our thinking from quarterly wins to a two-to-three year view of market expansion. That longer lens has been useful.

We built a practice of customer discovery. After IOI coached us on survey design, bias, and validation thresholds, I ran a structured customer survey experiment with eleven respondents. The results shaped our product direction and improved our internal consensus.

Looking ahead, how has this work reshaped your confidence to contribute to and drive and what ‘scaling’ realistically means for 2i2c as an open infrastructure organization?

Jim:  The most clarifying moment in the entire engagement was probably the reframing of what "scale" actually means for an organization like ours. Our first target isn't AWS-level growth — it's building repeatable, legible processes for five to ten customers of the same type. That sounds modest, but getting there requires exactly the kind of disciplined system-building we needed..

Emma's coaching shifted something more fundamental too. My focus used to be on getting things done; now it's on building evidence-based systems and knowledge that the whole team can work from. That's a different job in some important ways. The 2i2c team is more focused now on learning and building strong internal habits than on task completion — and I think that's the right foundation for where we want to go.

This post is part of our “Infrastructure Showcase” series. To stay updated on posts from this series and more from Invest in Open Infrastructure, please sign up for our newsletter. Interested in IOI’s strategic consulting services to further research infrastructure health, sustainability, and growth on these topics or related areas of work? Get in touch!  

Crossref's decision to join the Sustaining Circle reflects a relationship built on shared values and a belief in collaboration over competition. Both IOI and Crossref have worked to advance open infrastructure discovery, investment, and adoption. 

As foundational infrastructure, Crossref metadata is used by the majority of tools and services listed in the Infra Finder –IOI's tool for surfacing market intelligence that helps funders, institutions, and communities make more informed decisions about adopting and investing in open infrastructure, where Crossref is also listed. Their funding metadata has also been critical in analyzing funding trends in the IOI State of Open Infrastructure report.

Beyond shared tooling, both organizations are actively working in complementary ways to shape a more connected and equitable research ecosystem worldwide. IOI's Fund for Network Adoption and Crossref's Global Equitable Membership (GEM) program both reflect a commitment to ensuring that institutions in developing economies can meaningfully contribute to the global commons, not just access it. Crossref joining the Sustaining Circle strengthens this alignment and underscores the importance of collaborative investment in the open infrastructure that research communities depend on.

"As a peer organization in the open research ecosystem, we have great admiration for the work IOI does by providing valuable tools, research, and strategies to increase investment and adoption in open infrastructure. Open infrastructures are not free; as adopters and advocates of the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI), we wanted to play our part in ensuring IOI continues to make an impact supporting the sustainability of open infrastructures worldwide," said Ginny Hendricks, Crossref's Chief Program Officer.

​Why join the Sustaining Circle?

Becoming a member of IOI’s Sustaining Circle means joining a diverse community of universities, philanthropies, commercial publishers, national research funders, and non-profits working together to advance investment in and adoption of open infrastructure for scholarly research.

“We are delighted that Crossref has chosen to contribute towards IOI’s mission to make open the default in research. As an organization, we always emphasize the need for coordinated efforts and their support is crucial to the tools and resources that we provide to help inform a stronger, open, and connected global research ecosystem,” remarked Emma Green, IOI’s Director of Development.

Sustaining Circle members are vital to furthering IOI's targeted research that guides academic and research institutions, commercial publishers, and funders, and support the development of strategic tools that help decision-makers discover, evaluate, and invest in sustainable, community-governed open infrastructures.

In addition, Sustaining Circle membership signals something important: It marks your organization as a leader in the movement centered on community-governed scholarly infrastructure, one that actively shapes how knowledge is created, shared, and preserved. Direct benefits for Sustaining Circle members include early invitations to IOI events, opportunities to influence IOI's research agenda, first access to new research and analysis, and placement on IOI's website and in our annual impact report.

Ready to support the adoption and sustainability of open infrastructures?

If your organization is committed to building sustainable, community-led infrastructure and wants to help shape the direction of global open research, the IOI Sustaining Circle is where that work happens. We'd love to talk about what membership could look like for you. Reach out to Emma Green, our Director of Development, at emma@investinopen.org.

This is precisely the project that Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) supported for the Hyku repository platform, under an IMLS-funded grant led by PALNI and PALCI. Hyku is an open source multi-tenant repository application built on the Samvera-Hyrax framework, used by libraries and library consortia to manage and share digital collections. The goal of this project was to create a structured process to refine decision-making methods as the community moves toward sustainable structures.

Our approach: Deep listening and mapping

IOI's engagement began with deep listening and reading. We reviewed community documentation and conducted in-depth interviews with a cross-section of Hyku stakeholders, including service providers, consortium staff, library practitioners, and developers. That work, completed in Fall 2025, produced a Needs Assessment that mapped the community's current state: what was working, what wasn't, and what areas were ready for dedicated time to develop and grow. 

The Needs Assessment became the foundation for Phase 2: a facilitated implementation process with the Sustaining Hyku Steering Group, structured around two parallel workshop series.

Decision-making and collaboration

The first series brought together community members over four sessions to examine how decisions are actually made in Hyku and to begin building a system that would serve the growing community’s needs for greater transparency, stronger involvement, and better documentation.

What surfaced was a familiar pattern in open source communities: decisions were happening, but not in any single, visible place. Some came from interest group meetings, others from technical calls, and others from informal conversations between key individuals. The community lacked a shared understanding of who had authority to decide what, and no reliable place to record and communicate decisions once made.

There was also real tension between the desire for broad participation and the practical need for forward momentum. Community members described fatigue around being consulted on everything, but also frustration when consequential choices — particularly around what gets developed and what ends up in the shared codebase — moved forward without enough input. The group worked through their lived experiences and example scenarios to identify where the right points of friction were, and where streamlined decision-making was appropriate.

A key output of these sessions was a framework for mapping who should be involved in regular community decisions. The sessions also gave formal shape to a named, recognized decision-making body with community-delegated authority.

Financial strategy and community funding

The second series tackled the question that underlies everything else: how does the Hyku community pay for its long-term needs in a sustainable way?

IOI introduced scenario-planning tools, including high-, medium-, and low-budget frameworks, to help the group think concretely about the costs of sustaining Hyku and what a realistic funding model could look like. Participants were candid about the benefits and limitations of the current support structure, which was designed before the Hyku community experienced dramatic growth and development.

The group explored alternatives: tiered contribution levels, end-of-year giving options, project-specific sponsorships, and ways to recognize non-financial contributions. They looked to adjacent models such as consortium dues structures and other membership models for inspiration. One of the key goals was understanding what Hyku actually costs to sustain, and ways to showcase what the community’s contributions were paying for to all of the many different audiences for Hyku. 

Throughout, participants kept returning to a core challenge: how do you communicate the value of community membership clearly enough that institutions will commit, when "the code is free, but the labor isn't" is a message that lands differently for a library director than for a developer?

What IOI brings to this kind of work

Communities like Hyku face challenges that sit at the intersection of the technical and the organizational. IOI's role was to provide the scaffolding that allows a community to do work it can't easily do on its own: structured facilitation, proven frameworks, and an outside perspective that can name patterns insiders often can't see.

Starting from the document review and interviews conducted in Phase 1 meant the workshops could engage directly with real challenges rather than hypothetical ones. The structured assignments and deliverables between sessions kept momentum going and ensured that conversations translated into actionable outputs.

What participants said

“Sometimes assessment seems to be done to check something off a list. This process felt like it brought clarity and inspired action.” Rachel Howard, University of Louisville

“The conversational process [in the interview] brought out thoughts that I wouldn't have had if I were just to submit written answers to questions.” -LaRita Robinson, Notch8

“It made a very nebulous set of problems very clear, structured, and manageable.” -Anonymous

“It was both fun and very practical. Tying the two together is very beneficial, and I think helps increase the outcomes... We did a lot of work, but I feel very prepared for the next steps. For a process so short, I'm surprised at how set up for success I feel.” -Emma Beck, University of Louisville

Lessons for the field

This work reinforced several insights that apply well beyond Hyku to any open source community navigating a similar moment:

1. A thriving open source community is a feature, and an attractive one. Institutions choose platforms partly on technical merit, but they stay because of the people, the support, and the sense that the project is alive and cared for. Investing in community health isn't separate from the product work; it is part of the product.
2. Make time to study your own processes. It's easy to keep moving without stepping back to ask: how are we actually making decisions? What's creating friction, and what's opening up possibilities? Building in that reflection, with structure and outside perspective when needed, is what makes improvement possible.
3. The future is more than “what’s next”. Communities under funding pressure often focus on immediate continuity: what happens the day the grant ends? That's necessary, but not sufficient. Making real space to ask where you want to be in three to five years, and then working to identify what kind of community, governance, and funding model would get you there, is what distinguishes a temporary rope bridge from a more permanent foundation.
4. Transparency about cost is an act of community trust. One of the most generative conversations in the financial sessions was about what Hyku actually costs to sustain, and how little of that is visible to most users and contributors. Being honest about the true cost of maintaining open infrastructure and communicating it clearly is what allows communities to ask for fair support and for institutions to say yes.

What comes next

The workshop series concluded in February 2026, and the community is already carrying the work forward from the foundation that they built. Community members are gathering more information and developing plans to achieve their sustainability goals. The community plans to share the governance framework with the broader Hyku and Samvera community at Samvera Virtual Connect in May 2026.

The goal — a Hyku community that can sustain itself, make decisions clearly, and broaden its base of contributors — is within reach, and we are excited to see where the Hyku community goes from here.

Interested in working with IOI on sustainability planning for your open infrastructure project? Get in touch at research@investinopen.org.

This is a working board. Members don't just advise: they engage actively with strategy, finances, governance, and fundraising. If you're someone who wants to roll up your sleeves and help shape an organization at a pivotal moment, this could be a great fit.

IOI’s work sits at the intersection of mission and strategy. We combine deep ecosystem understanding with business strategy to help open infrastructure organizations build sustainable models, help funders make smarter investment decisions, and help institutions make the case for adopting open tools. Through strategic consulting, cross-sector collaborative programmes, and the IOI Fund for Network Adoption, we bridge the gap between mission-driven values and the business thinking needed to thrive.

Research and innovation run on open infrastructure: the shared tools, standards, and platforms that make research accessible, data interoperable, and knowledge free to use. But the teams that build and maintain this infrastructure often operate without the strategic support or sustainable funding they need to thrive. Here’s what we’re looking for in new Steering Committee members.

What we’re looking for

We're looking for people with meaningful expertise in two or more of these areas:

• Financial sustainability and revenue diversification: particularly for mission-driven organizations navigating the shift beyond grant dependence
• Legal structures and international expansion: especially UK entity formation, cross-border governance, or social enterprise models
• Blended finance and alternative funding: recoverable grants, programme-related investments, or innovative funding vehicles
• Building consulting or professional services practices within research, strategy, or mission-driven contexts
• Funder and institutional relationships, with the ability and willingness to open doors in philanthropy, institutional investment, or the commercial research sector
• Global networks, particularly active connections in Africa, Latin America, and other regions where open research infrastructure is growing
• Open research and scholarly communication, deep familiarity with the ecosystem and credibility within it
• Adjacent fields, policy, technology, journalism, public health, civic tech, law, or other domains where open infrastructure matters but isn't yet centred

We also value strong financial literacy, strategic thinking, comfort with distributed decision-making, and a genuine willingness to engage between meetings — not just show up quarterly.

Beyond skills, we're intentional about building a committee that reflects the global scope of our work. We actively seek nominees whose backgrounds, geographies, and perspectives broaden the range of experience at the table.

Who you'll be joining

Our current Steering Committee brings together people working across open research, philanthropy, technology, finance, and global development:

Amy Buckland (Concordia University), Joe Deville (Open Book Collective, Co-Chair), Robert Karanja (Independent), Tracy Hinds (Fastly), Louise Marston (Resolution Foundation), Eunice Mercado-Lara (Open Research Community Accelerator, Co-Chair), Danil Mikhailov (data.org), Omo Oaiya (WACREN), Lorrayne Porciuncula (Datasphere), Amy Sample Ward (NTEN), and Jeff Ubois (Stichting Internet Archive). 

The opportunity

This is a chance to shape an organization that sits at the intersection of open knowledge, institutional strategy, and global development. As a Steering Committee member, you'll help IOI navigate questions like: How do we grow sustainably? What structure best supports our mission internationally? Where should we focus — and what should we say no to?

It's a voluntary commitment of approximately 15–20 hours per year, including quarterly full committee meetings and participation in at least one subcommittee focused on areas like governance, finance, or strategic priorities. The standard term is three years, with the option to renew.

How to nominate

We welcome both self-nominations and nominations of others. Nominations close on 10 April 2026.

For full details on what we're looking for, the selection process, and what to expect, read our Steering Committee Nomination Brief (PDF).

Questions? Reach out to us at operations@investinopen.org.

We started with frameworks. We ended with trust.

What we set out to do

The open research infrastructure landscape is complex, with hundreds of tools spanning every phase of research workflows. Funders need to make strategic investments. Adopters need platforms that serve their communities. Infrastructure providers need to demonstrate value and sustainability.

The open source community has developed sophisticated frameworks for assessing community health such as CHAOSS, FOREST, and POSI. We wanted to understand: Do these frameworks inform how people choose, fund, or build infrastructure?

Our hypothesis was straightforward: if we could identify common values among stakeholders, these populations could align in ways that strengthen the entire ecosystem. As we framed it: "Open" is a set of values. Values shape behavior.

How we approached the research

We took a three-phase participatory approach:

Phase 1 (January-May 2025): We studied the three major community health frameworks and conducted in-depth interviews with infrastructure providers, funders/buyers, and adopters/end users. Each conversation had two parts: understanding their awareness of existing frameworks, and exploring how they actually made decisions in practice.

Phase 2 (May-August 2025): From interview analysis, we identified 11 recurring evaluation themes that cut across stakeholder types. We published initial findings in our 2025 State of Open Infrastructure report, discussed them on CHAOSScast Episode 112, and shared insights through blog posts.

Phase 3 (September-December 2025): We brought stakeholders back for role-specific co-design workshops. Participants sorted our 11 themes by importance, discussed what resonated, and helped us refine definitions. This validation process ensured our framework reflected real perspectives rather than academic assumptions.

Community health frameworks: Valuable in context

Most interview participants hadn't heard  the term “community health” applied in the context of open source software before; many thought we were going to be asking them about public (medical) health initiatives, which prompted us to revise our use of this particular term. Beyond the issues with the umbrella term, many participants were also unfamiliar with the specific frameworks like CHAOSS, FOREST, and POSI before our conversations. This doesn't mean these frameworks aren't useful, but rather that their utility is context-specific rather than universal. 

The frameworks excel in certain niches:

• CHAOSS is valuable for providers doing self-assessment of community health
• FOREST provides guidance specifically for scholarly communication infrastructure
• POSI offers aspirational principles for governance and sustainability

Workshop feedback confirmed that they work better as internal assessment tools than external evaluation rubrics. 

The main finding: Values live in tension

Our most significant discovery challenged our initial assumptions. We thought community health frameworks were primarily aspirational statements of values that infrastructure should strive toward.

What we found was more nuanced: stakeholders operate in constant tension between aspirational values and practical constraints.

One workshop participant captured this perfectly: they rely heavily on a commercial tool despite knowing it doesn't align with their values, because institutional requirements, usage patterns, and costs make it impractical to switch to another tool. Their ideal values don't match the decisions they actually make due to institutional contexts and resource limitations.

This isn't a hierarchy where practical needs come first, then values. It's a continuous balancing act, or a "seesaw," as one participant described it, where context constantly shifts which end matters more. Cost, capacity, institutional policies, network effects, and other pressures mean that revealed preferences often diverge from stated ideals.

One universal priority: Data sovereignty

Across all three stakeholder groups (providers, funders, and adopters), one theme emerged as universally critical: Data Ownership, Portability, and Control.

This was the only theme that received "Very Important" ratings across all participants in all workshops. As one adopter explained, their communities feel more strongly about what they put into systems than about the systems themselves. The data and content are what truly matter.

Data sovereignty transcends role, geography, and organizational context as a foundational requirement for trust. It reflects deep concerns about:

• Vendor lock-in and the ability to exit if infrastructure changes direction
• Commercial capture of scholarly outputs and research data
• Researcher and institutional control over their own work
• Transparency about how collected data is used

The implication of this finding is that, for this community, any infrastructure that doesn't prioritize data sovereignty will face significant resistance. This isn't a nice-to-have feature, but the closest thing we revealed to a threshold requirement.

The 11 evaluation themes

Through our research, we identified 11 themes that stakeholders consistently reference when evaluating infrastructure. These themes represent values and practical considerations that come into tension during decision-making.

The universal priority:

• Data Ownership, Portability, and Control - Users retain ownership; clear exit strategies exist; transparent data use policies.

The practical foundations:

• Affordability - Total cost of ownership within budget (but really about value, not just price).
• Technical Requirements - Features, integrations, and compatibility (including ease of adoption).
• Policy and Regulatory Compliance - Meets institutional requirements (binary threshold: when it applies, it's non-negotiable).

The sustainability factors:

• Fiscal Security - Adequate, sustainable funding (critical but hardest to assess from outside).
• Longevity and Embeddedness - Well-established and actively used (can signal stability OR technical debt).
• Usage and Adoption - Adopted by similar users (innovation vs. stability trade-off).

The governance dimensions:

• Transparent Governance - Clear decision-making processes (transparency ≠ participation).
• Sense of Community and Belonging - Inclusive community with effective input mechanisms.

The trust indicators:

• Values Alignment and Community Orientation - Mission-driven decisions prioritizing community over profit.
• Support and Technical Training - Available from providers, third parties, or community (broader than just official documentation).

The resilience factor

One theme kept surfacing in our workshops but wasn't captured in our original 11: resilience. Funders particularly emphasized this as a critical cross-theme consideration encompassing:

• Financial resilience: Weathering funding fluctuations
• Technical resilience: Adapting to new technologies and handling increased load (including AI scraping)
• Political resilience: Operating across different political regimes
• Organizational resilience: Distributed capacity rather than single points of failure

The distinction matters: resilience is forward-looking (can we adapt to future disruptions?) while longevity is backward-looking (have we survived past challenges?). Past success doesn't guarantee future adaptability.

From community health to trust

We started this project with one idea of "community health" and ended with another. The frameworks we studied help infrastructure communities assess and develop in healthy ways. Underneath those frameworks, we discovered another layer: the values and trade-offs that stakeholders use across contexts to build something more fundamental than health.

They build trust.

When our workshop participants talked about open infrastructure, their concerns ultimately came down to trust:

• Trust that scholarly outputs and research data will remain accessible
• Trust that infrastructure will serve community needs over profit incentives
• Trust that decisions will be made transparently
• Trust that they can exit if things change

The 11 evaluation themes we identified aren't just criteria, but also a foundation of that trust. Data sovereignty matters because it signals respect for what researchers create. Values alignment matters because it indicates whose interests drive decisions. Fiscal security matters because it suggests the infrastructure will be there when needed.

Our takeaways

Our findings led to refinements in Infra Finder and validated that the information we collect aligns with what stakeholders actually need to know. More importantly, this research illuminated how different stakeholders evaluate infrastructure, what information they need, and how they navigate competing priorities.

The path forward isn't about creating "one framework to rule them all." It's about:

• Developing clearer shared language so stakeholders can communicate about what matters.
• Making information more accessible, especially around hard-to-assess themes like fiscal security, resilience, and governance.
• Helping stakeholders articulate and navigate their values alongside their constraints.
• Building tools that meet different stakeholders where they are.

By understanding these dynamics, we can build a more resilient, more trustworthy, more sustainable open infrastructure ecosystem – one grounded not just in a desire to do right by the community, but with confidence that the infrastructures will operate as bedrock.

Resources

Read the full report: “Building trust through values: Measurement of Community Health Indicators (MoCHI) project report.” https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18929158

Related reading:

• Trust, transparency, and technology: Do community health frameworks shape open infrastructure decisions? (2025 State of Open Infrastructure)
• What do institutions need to know before choosing open infrastructure?
• Building bridges: How trust and community health frameworks can strengthen open infrastructure decision-making

Listen: 

• CHAOSScast Episode 112 - Community health metrics and open infrastructure decision making

All project outputs are available on our Project Landing Page. 

This research was supported by the Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund. We're grateful to all the infrastructure providers, funders, and adopters who shared their time and perspectives through interviews and workshops.

In today’s evolving scholarly communication landscape, open infrastructure enables university libraries to actively participate in the ownership and governance of the platforms where knowledge is created, preserved, and shared. Ghent University joining the IOI Sustaining Circle is a continuation of their commitment to supporting open research infrastructure initiatives.

“As a university library, we realize the importance of open infrastructures in breaking down barriers to access to research, promoting equity and community interests in open science, and democratizing knowledge. Over the years we have supported several open publishing infrastructures and are delighted to now support IOI given the critical work they do in providing much needed tools and resources needed to advance open scholarship globally,” remarked Myriam Mertens, Team Lead, Open Science at Ghent University Library.

In joining IOI's Sustaining Circle, Ghent University stands behind IOI's work, which creates stronger collaboration, strategic coordination, and expert guidance for stakeholders across the ecosystem to ensure the sustainability of open research infrastructures.

“We are delighted that Ghent University decided to join the network of organizations supporting IOI’s work through the Sustaining Circle. Universities libraries are critical stakeholders in scholarly communication and this commitment by Ghent University is indicative of the role libraries can play in the development and sustenance of open infrastructures,” commented Emma Green, IOI’s Director of Development.

​Perks of the Sustaining Circle

Membership in the Sustaining Circle is open to anyone who shares our vision of advancing open infrastructure investment and adoption. Sustaining Circle members are vital to furthering IOI's targeted research that guides academic and research institutions, commercial publishers, and funders, and support the development of strategic tools that help decision-makers discover, evaluate, and invest in sustainable, community-governed open infrastructures.

Organizations in the Sustaining Circle not only demonstrate leadership in the transition to community-governed scholarly infrastructure but also help shape the future of how knowledge is created, shared, and preserved for generations to come. Members also benefit from early invitations to IOI events, opportunities to help shape IOI’s work, first access to our research and analysis, and recognition on our website and in our impact report.

​Join us in shaping the future of open research

​If your organization is ready to make a strategic investment in sustainable, community-led infrastructure and help shape the trajectory of global open scholarship, we invite you to learn more about IOI's Sustaining Circle. Please contact Emma Green, our Director of Development, via emma@investinopen.org.

This isn't just an American problem. It's a warning for the world: when governments are the single point of access for irreplaceable scientific data, political shifts can cause permanent knowledge loss.

Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) has secured US$600,000 from Global Impact to support coordination and design efforts around these critical data preservation issues. This effort will explore coordinated, interoperable, and sustainable infrastructure solutions for protecting vital scientific knowledge — not just in response to current threats, but as a long-term solution against future risks globally. We will convene key players and initiatives, map the current landscape of rescue and archiving efforts, probe at key design questions regarding data availability and scale, and build an evidence-based investment case for coordinated open infrastructure that reduces our collective reliance on any single access point.

We're not starting from scratch. Important preservation work is already underway across the ecosystem, from the Internet Archive and Data Rescue Project to ICPSR/Data Lumos, EDGI, Dryad, Center for Open Science, source.coop, Filecoin, and many others. We aim to complement existing, decentralized data rescue efforts by identifying where and how coordination and sustainability planning can strengthen collective efforts. 

The challenge is significant. We're talking about data at the scale of weather systems, earth observation, and national health surveillance, data that serves researchers, policymakers, and commercial interests alike. Solutions will need to address not just storage and archiving, but questions of data sovereignty (including non-US cloud options), metadata coordination across repositories, and access requirements that may exceed current open infrastructure capabilities.

This initial funding allows us to map the current landscape, identify where coordination, design, and sustainability support can strengthen existing efforts, and build the evidence-based case for the larger coordinated investment that is needed to support sustainability backup infrastructure at scale. Our goal is to be additive to the critical work that is already underway — helping organisations to coordinate their efforts and developing the frameworks that can secure long-term funding for resilient systems that ensure scientific data remains accessible

The stakes couldn't be higher. Scientific knowledge is irreplaceable, and the window for coordinated action is narrow. But with the right infrastructure, coordination, and investment, we can transform today's emergency response into tomorrow's resilient solution. If you’re working on data preservation, rescue, or infrastructure in this space, we want to hear from you. Contact us at research@investinopen.org to get involved.

At Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI), these questions kept surfacing in our steering committee conversations. Standard reporting told us where we stood; it didn't tell us when to move. So we built something that could.

The problem

Non profit and open infrastructure organizations often face a particular version of this challenge: high grant dependency, a heavy reliance on restricted funding that limits flexibility, long and uncertain pipeline cycles, small teams, and a constant tension between mission work and financial sustainability. In conversations with peers and funders across the sector, we found no consistent shared framework for measuring financial health in organizations like ours. Funders care about it deeply: they don't want to invest in organizations that won't be viable when the grant ends, but approaches vary widely. We set out to build something for ourselves, and in doing so, we think we've built something others can use too.

What we built

10 indicators, split into three categories:

1. Critical runway: will we survive the next 12 months?
2. Pipeline health: is our pipeline strong enough?
3. Sustainability: are we building towards financial sustainability?

One example indicator is weighted pipeline coverage: the sum of committed revenue and projected revenue for the coming fiscal year, where each projected opportunity is multiplied by its probability of closing. The formula is simple; the calibration is not. What probability do you assign to a grant you've submitted but haven't heard back on? How realistic are your pipeline stages and their associated probability ‘scores’? Getting those judgments right, and agreed upon, takes deliberate work and iteration.

We connected the indicators to two layers of decision-support: a traffic light system that signals the health of each individual metric, and a decision trigger framework that looks across indicators together to determine what phase of risk we’re in, and what pre-defined actions that phase requires. That second layer, built and agreed with our steering committee, is what turns monitoring into decision-making.

What we’ve learnt

• You can't monitor what you can't measure. Before the indicators could run reliably, we needed data infrastructure many small organizations don't have: mature pipeline management, disciplined data hygiene, processes that connect opportunity tracking to financial reporting. This work is often the real prerequisite, and where organizations often need help first.
• Indicators without alignment are just data. Defining what “amber” or “red” means requires explicit conversations with leadership and governance about risk appetite — conversations many organizations haven't had. Co-designing the framework with your stakeholders, rather than presenting it to them, is what turns a monitoring tool into a shared decision-making language.
• This is a diagnostic tool, not a cure. Its value is moving from we're worried about our finances to our pipeline coverage is below threshold, and here's the specific action we've agreed to take. That specificity transforms financial monitoring from a source of ambient anxiety into a strategic tool: giving leadership and governance a shared language, agreed thresholds, and the confidence to know not just what is happening, but what to do about it.

IOI offers support in building financial risk monitoring frameworks tailored to your organization, from indicator design and governance alignment to data infrastructure and implementation. If you’re interested in exploring this, get in touch! 

Hitting the ground running

Last November, we announced the inaugural grantees of the IOI Fund for Network Adoption — LA Referencia and UbuntuNet Alliance, two leading regional research networks in Latin America and Africa respectively. Grantees will each receive up to US$1.5M in funding over the next three years to advance the adoption of open infrastructure and strengthen regional research ecosystems, with the respective projects commencing this month. In addition to funding, IOI staff will work in collaboration with the project teams to provide tailored governance support, sustainability planning, strategic guidance, and operational support to ensure long-term impact and resilience of the projects. Repositories are a central feature in both grantee projects and Lyrasis’ support for the Fund will be essential in optimizing their impact. Lyrasis is the organizational home to community-supported technologies like DSpace and serves a rich network of universities, institutions and cultural heritage organizations globally. 

“The core of our work as an organization is helping cultural heritage institutions increase their impact while reducing costs through the use of open technologies, content services, and community-based solutions,” said John Wilkin, Lyrasis’ CEO. “We are excited to work with IOI to support the Fund for Network Adoption because it builds on our deep alignment in a belief that open infrastructures are essential in democratising knowledge.” 

The proposal process revealed the scale of the challenge: US$148 million in unmet need across research networks. The Fund addresses this through a distinctive model: South-South peer collaboration between networks, coupled with hands-on support on sustainability planning and governance. 

“Lyrasis’ leadership in and deep commitment to supporting community-based solutions and open technologies such as DSpace make them an exciting contributor to the IOI Fund,” said Kaitlin Thaney, IOI’s Executive Director. “Lyrasis’ contribution will go a long way to meeting the enormous demand for knowledge sharing infrastructure at a global level and community-hosted solutions that empower the local research community, tailored to their needs and context.”

A coalition of mission-aligned actors shaping the future of research

The Lyrasis contribution brings the total amount raised to over US$5M — over 80% towards our goal of US$6M. Lyrasis joins other organizations like Wellcome, Digital Science, the Kahle Austin Foundation, Arcadia, EBSCO, and the Karger Publishers Foundation in the shared vision of strengthening the global open research ecosystem through the IOI Fund for Network Adoption.

This coalition brings together supporters who believe research infrastructure should be open, equitable, and sustainable: philanthropies, mission-aligned research technology companies, and private donors who recognize that investing in open infrastructure is essential to enhance global participation in research.

If your foundation or organization is interested in supporting open infrastructure adoption, whether in specific regions, around particular technologies, or focused on certain communities, we'd love to have a conversation. We have a current, deep understanding of the landscape and a strong, global pool of networks ready for partnership. Please contact Emma Green, IOI’s Director of Development, at emma@investinopen.org.

We sat down with Kathleen Fitzpatrick to discuss how Knowledge Commons has evolved since its move from the Modern Language Association to Michigan State University, how the platform is becoming mission-critical infrastructure for its host institution, and why getting institutions to think beyond "vendor mode" remains one of the field's most pressing challenges.

From scholarly society to university: A strategic hosting transition

Knowledge Commons began its life at the Modern Language Association (MLA) as an attempt to create a cooperative platform infrastructure for scholarly societies. The original vision was that societies would pool resources to support shared infrastructure, each hosting its own commons while collectively maintaining the underlying platform.

"Very quickly, we realized that no other society in the humanities other than the MLA could afford to do that," Fitzpatrick explains. However, several universities had expressed interest in how Knowledge Commons – then known as Humanities Commons – could address an infrastructure need for their faculty and students. The pivot to universities made strategic sense. Universities have more robust budgets than societies and, crucially, "have as part of their mission supporting the research infrastructure for their faculty," Fitzpatrick notes. The move to Michigan State in 2020 allowed Knowledge Commons to demonstrate what the platform could do for an institution.

Moving from a scholarly society to a university brought complex governance considerations. At the MLA, the platform operated through the organization's Executive Council. Like most public universities, MSU has a Board of Trustees that formally governs all MSU activities. This meant Fitzpatrick couldn't establish an independent “board” for Knowledge Commons without being in conflict with MSU’s policies.

The solution was to create a "governing council" instead, using language that works within institutional constraints while preserving as much as possible the spirit and practice of the platform's community-governed nature. Fitzpatrick shares that the by-laws for Knowledge Commons acknowledge that "ultimately, everything has to be approved by the Board of Trustees," though in practice, that Board allows Knowledge Commons to run autonomously unless it needs particular institutional assistance. Fitzpatrick emphasizes that, "the Governing Council is the one really making the decisions for the platform."

The Office of General Counsel at MSU has become an important partner in this work, not only by providing legal and contract support, but also as collaborators. "The folks in our Office of General Counsel have become, over time, more and more invested in our way of thinking about what this project is and how it should function," Fitzpatrick says. It's a relationship built through patient engagement and demonstrated value.

Becoming mission-critical through service

Having its new home at MSU also presented a key opportunity. The university had implemented a few separate faculty profile and document listing systems, but it had never had a campus-wide, unified institutional repository. Fitzpatrick saw the opportunity for Knowledge Commons, and worked with her team to step in to meet genuine institutional needs. 

The value proposition for Knowledge Commons has only grown stronger over time. When the university library faced difficult choices due to budget cuts, the Knowledge Commons team provided services previously handled by external vendors, including data repository services. The platform now hosts MSU's institutional repository, collaborates with the campus's high-performance computing center to provide a discovery layer on the center’s massive-scale data storage, and has taken over hosting for the Center for Teaching and Learning Innovation's collaboration space. "We're becoming very clearly important to the campus," Fitzpatrick observes.

Yet this success creates its own challenges. "Because we are homegrown, the kinds of support that we're receiving from MSU are often in-kind, and sometimes a little bit tenuous," she notes frankly. The employees who work on Knowledge Commons are paid entirely through the grants and membership income generated by the Commons, and in the changing fiscal environment, that monetary support needs to be balanced with the labor and facilities provided by the university host. To do this work, the Knowledge Commons team uses their unique insight into the value and need for this platform. 

The insider's advantage: Seeing institutional needs others miss

Drawing on her experience as a faculty member, Fitzpatrick knew that many of her colleagues often produce work that doesn't fit conventional publication models: white papers, reports, creative outputs, and clinical faculty scholarship. For those researchers, "their career advancement really depends on the public aspect, but not on the conventional markers of prestige that go along with journals and books," Fitzpatrick explains. One way to make that material available is through a repository like KC Works, one of the offerings from Knowledge Commons. "We realized that we had a real opportunity to reach out to those folks and show them that KC Works is a place where they can share that material." This knowledge built the foundation of KC Works and Knowledge Commons and helped to foster its success and uptake. 

Now Fitzpatrick's new position as Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies gives her unique insight into institutional needs that traditional infrastructure often overlooks. "Being in this position has enabled me to see the wide range of work that is going on at my institution.” One example is how recent events have sharpened the message behind Knowledge Commons and KC Works as a scholar-driven platform. "The end of Twitter made it clear to a lot of people that they needed better options with better control over their work and their communication, and we can provide those better options," Fitzpatrick notes. "A scholar, researcher, instructor, or artist, they all need a place to share their work. We can provide that. It is free of charge for them. And we are a much better actor in that space than the other places where they can do this." 

The KC Works platform also serves researchers without stable institutional affiliations such as contingent faculty, graduate students, and researchers beyond the academy. These audiences need infrastructure they can take with them from one position to another. For these individuals, the contrast with other ‘free to the user’ platforms — where, as Fitzpatrick notes, "everything you upload is being sold to AI mining and other nefarious purposes" — is stark, and responds to a need in the academic community for platforms that aren’t built on extraction. 

Attending to the institutional realities of who needs infrastructure and why provides a strong foundation for understanding the value proposition for individuals. However, additional challenges arise when working with university administration. 

Breaking out of "vendor mode": The challenge of values-based procurement

Perhaps the most persistent challenge Knowledge Commons faces is institutional procurement culture. When universities consider joining the network, "they immediately flip into vendor mode," Fitzpatrick says, asking about uptime, response times, and long-term sustainability. Even in conversations with research libraries that have championed open access, "we still find ourselves sort of put back into the vendor box."

They ask: will you be here in 10 years?

"The answer to that question is: not if you don't join," Fitzpatrick responds, acknowledging that is "not an answer that they want to hear."

Fitzpatrick and her team once again draw on their knowledge of the institution’s behaviors; in this case, they see a key advocacy opportunity for institutions involving control of their outputs. "The long-term goals that Knowledge Commons has align with the goals of the Academy to remain in control of the knowledge that it's producing," Fitzpatrick says, noting that this goal drives everything Knowledge Commons does. 

Fitzpatrick notes that institutions need to reframe Knowledge Commons not as a vendor but as a coalition. Institutions aren't purchasing a service, but rather "investing in something that they have governance rights in. It is meant to be a fully shared infrastructure that they belong to, but that also belongs to them." This perspective is rooted in Fitzpatrick’s own humanistic discipline as well as Knowledge Commons’s founding in the humanities disciplines and original creation for the Modern Language Association and its members. Community and collaboration are foundational to the platform and embedded in its operations.

The funding reality and new sustainability models

One persistent misconception is that because Knowledge Commons is free for end users, it doesn't require significant resources. "Something that's free to the end user isn't free to produce," Fitzpatrick says plainly. "There's still labor, there's still costs that have to be met. We run on a pretty tight budget. We're very lean."

She identifies two problematic institutional attitudes. First: "There is sometimes in the open access community, sometimes at large institutions like my own, a conviction that if you're selling something, you must have gone down the for-profit path, and therefore are not a good operator in open access space. Which is not true, we're just trying to remain sustainable."

Second: "There is a bias in a lot of large institutions toward major corporate providers because of the sense that though we all hate the big corporate entities, at least we know they'll still be here in 10 years." This fundamentally misunderstands what sustainable, community-governed infrastructure can be.

"It's sometimes not clear that neither of those positions are true," Fitzpatrick says. "Big corporate entities often cut product lines that aren’t producing sufficient profit or otherwise sustaining their interest, while nonprofits may be fiscally precarious and yet committed to their communities There is a space for a sustainable, non-extractive, values-based, community-governed platform."

To address funding challenges, Knowledge Commons is launching a multi-tiered approach. Beyond full institutional memberships, the new KC Champions option allows individuals to support the platform and be part of the network and provide support for the platform while receiving benefits such as custom domain mapping. 

Building new tools for impact

Knowledge Commons isn't standing still. With NSF FAIROS funding, the platform is building a "publish, review, curate, assess" workflow. "The repository is the form of publication," Fitzpatrick explains. "Publication happens first, when you make a deposit. Authors can then request peer review through Pilcrow, Knowledge Commons' collaborative review platform, or submission to open access journals.”

The "assess" component addresses a critical need. A new statistics dashboard provides rich analytics on repository usage, viewable different levels from large collections down to individual deposits. "We need authors who use this process to be able to tell the story of the impact of the work at the point of annual review or promotion and tenure review," Fitzpatrick explains. “But we also know that this data is key for institutions to understand the impact of all of the knowledge they are supporting.” 

The ultimate goal? "Freeing the academy from the conventional journal publishing model, which has failed us miserably."

The path forward

When asked what she wishes people understood about Knowledge Commons, Fitzpatrick's answer crystallizes the platform's challenge and promise: "I want decision makers at academic institutions and in scholarly societies – those who are dissatisfied with the tools that they've been using and with the platforms that they're paying for – to know that there are better options, and that we're one of them."

The core of that difference is that Knowledge Commons is committed to remaining free and open, to never selling user data, to never pursuing for-profit operation. But sustainability requires support from the community it serves. "We are committed to remaining not-for-profit," Fitzpatrick says. "But in order to do that, we really, really need help." That help comes from the community of institutions and individuals who invest in the Commons and participate in governance to chart the future of their shared endeavor. "As an institution joins the network, they get a seat at the table," Fitzpatrick emphasizes. "Their ability to help shape the future of the platform is its sustainability model, its governance model. That is how we transform from a platform that’s free to use right now into a genuine commons."

The path forward relies on the scholarly community recognizing this opportunity and stepping up to support it. Knowledge Commons provides a case study of how a platform serves the research community by balancing institutional realities with community governance, building sustainable funding while remaining non-extractive, and demonstrating professional capacity while maintaining values-driven operations. This kind of community-driven infrastructure is essential for the future of research. 

To learn more about Knowledge Commons or explore options for institutional or individual support, visit hcommons.org or contact the team directly.

Infra Finder is now two years old, and we continue to work with open infrastructure communities, users, and funders of OI to add new entries showcasing open infrastructure services that power research and its dissemination. Today, we’re excited to share our latest update with new entries, updated information and intake processes, and expanded solution categories. 

Infra Finder: An open infrastructure discovery and evaluation tool

• Verified information about 134 open infrastructures — and growing! In 2025, we added 32 new entries and received updates from 70 of our existing entries. 
• Three new solution categories to explore. Based on user and community interest, we have newly added the following new solution categories: 
  • Data collection or management tool: Software used to gather, structure, clean, and maintain datasets. e.g.: Open Data Editor
  • Geospatial data tool or platform: A software or system used to publish, query, analyse, visualize, and/or archive geographic datasets. e.g.: GeoServer. 
  • Integrated Library System (ILS) or Library Services Platform (LSP): A software suite that manages core library operations such as cataloguing, circulation, acquisitions, and resource discovery. e.g.: FOLIO. 
• Targeted filtering and comparison tool. Using Infra Finder, you can refine options based on specific criteria and compare up to four solutions side-by-side. In 2025, we conducted a research project to better understand the types of information users seek when evaluating open infrastructure. Read more about our research here. 
• A data source used by adopters and funders alike. At IOI, we use Infra Finder to understand the open infrastructure landscape in projects like our State of Open Infrastructure report. In addition, funding organizations have shared that they're using our data to revise evaluation rubrics and inform decisions on what to support, adopters are using Infra Finder listings to speed approval processes. And OIs themselves are using our intake instrument to shape discussions about policies and activities. We’ve released the latest dataset about Infra Finder so you can use it for your own research. 

Share your use cases and feedback today

IOI makes Infra Finder and its data open, and your stories about how you've been using the tool and the data are a powerful signal of our collective commitment towards open science and transparency. We'd love to hear how you're using — or want to use — Infra Finder and the data. Please take a moment to tell us about it. 

Open infrastructures can request inclusion at any time

In 2025, we developed a process that allows open infrastructure services to be added to Infra Finder and updated at any time throughout the year, enabling continuous growth and ensuring the data stays current. Our team works closely with representatives from each OI to develop the entries and verify the information for Infra Finder users. We have streamlined this collaboration process and look forward to adding new entries in 2026. 

For anyone interested in adding a service to Infra Finder: 

1. Review our eligibility criteria and process information to ensure the service is a good fit for Infra Finder. 
2. Complete our Expression of Interest (EOI) form, which collects basic information about the service. (Note: this should be filled out by someone formally affiliated with the service or infrastructure!) 
3. The Infra Finder team will review the EOI and contact the submitter with the next steps. 

If you have any questions about whether an open infrastructure service is eligible for Infra Finder, please contact our team at infra-finder [at] investinopen [dot] org.

Overview

The rapid development and deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI tools are reshaping the knowledge ecosystem. The AI development race is creating both opportunities and challenges for stakeholders across the knowledge ecosystem including cultural heritage institutions, publishers, developers, and funders. On one hand, there is a heightened demand for high-quality data that can be used to train the LLMs. On the other, the rapid growth of AI is creating operational, legal, and sustainability challenges for the entire ecosystem. Infrastructure strain from high-volume data access, questions about fair compensation and attribution, and environmental concerns are emerging as shared challenges that require cross-sector collaboration.

The BRIDGE project is connecting these stakeholders by attending simultaneously to their differing motivations and their overlapping challenges. Our project focuses on two main groups: organizations that provide open, curated data, and those seeking or using open, curated data for LLM training. We aim to surface, share, and address the myriad challenges arising from increased collection usage/mining and to recalibrate workflows and expectations to support the long-term stability of open collections. IOI is working as a trusted intermediary between diverse stakeholder groups to help create mutually beneficial business strategies and frameworks that protect and expand the value and resilience of open knowledge collections. Our goal is to bring to the fore the interdependencies between different stakeholder groups and develop partnership models that align open knowledge strategies and commercial needs.

Project Outputs

Blog posts

• Invest in Open Infrastructure. (2025, December 8.) "BRIDGE: Exploring cross-sector partnerships in the AI-era."

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

This project, which runs through April 2028, has been made possible through a US$750,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation.

The challenge

The rapid development and deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI tools are reshaping the knowledge ecosystem. The AI development race is creating both opportunities and challenges for stakeholders across the knowledge ecosystem including cultural heritage institutions, publishers, developers, and funders. On one hand, there is a heightened demand for high quality data that can be used to train the LLMs. On the other, the rapid growth of AI is creating operational, legal, and sustainability challenges for the entire ecosystem. Infrastructure strain from high-volume data access, questions about fair compensation and attribution, and environmental concerns are emerging as shared challenges that require cross-sector collaboration.

What we’re doing

Through BRIDGE, we will bring together stakeholders that often lack opportunities to connect, including those that may have different drivers but shared problem areas to address. We will focus especially on organizations providing open, curated data and organizations that are seeking and using data for LLM training to help these groups look at the unanticipated but real-time collisions that are resulting from increased collection demand and consider how to recalibrate workflows and expectations to ensure the long-term stability of open collections. IOI will also leverage the trust that we have built with diverse stakeholder groups to plan and implement safe spaces in which mutually beneficial business tactics and frameworks can be designed that protect and ideally broaden the usefulness and resilience of open knowledge collections. The ultimate outcome: partnership models that align open knowledge strategies and commercial demand.

Why IOI?

We sit at the intersection of philanthropies, service providers, industry, and the research community. We have built a unique position as a trusted intermediary with a landscape view of the research ecosystem. BRIDGE also serves as an opportunity to pilot new mechanisms that strengthen IOI’s own organizational capacity and long-term sustainability. With BRIDGE, we aim to deepen our work at the complex intersections between groups — positioning IOI as the leading facilitator of complex, cross-sector stakeholder engagement in open infrastructure while developing sustainable revenue streams that reinforce our own organizational independence and growth.

What’s next?

We're conducting landscape research now. Participant recruitment begins in early 2026. If you're part of the knowledge ecosystem and navigating how AI is changing things - whether you manage collections, develop technology, fund infrastructure, or work on the legal, technical, or policy challenges, and you are interested in participating in the BRIDGE project, please reach out to us via research@investinopen.org. 

You can stay updated on the latest updates on BRIDGE by signing up for our newsletter and following us on social media (LinkedIn, BlueSky, and Mastodon).

A process designed to identify readiness and community connection

We designed the Fund selection process to identify networks that are most genuinely ready: not just technically capable, but deeply connected to and trusted by their communities. A critical part of the process is building regional expertise at every step of review, because understanding community relationships and regional context requires reviewers with lived experience and first-hand knowledge of those landscapes.

The Fund’s 100+ pre-applications were each reviewed by three independent reviewers from our Community Advisory Panel, which included a majority of colleagues from the focal regions of the Fund. The Panel provided contextual expertise that proved invaluable in surfacing proposals that might have been undervalued through purely technical assessments, but that demonstrated strong strategic positioning and community trust within their regions.

We paired this knowledge with technical expertise. We constituted a Technical Advisory Panel whose remit was to assess proposals on whether their proposed solutions are sound and feasible. We also conducted reference checks with members and collaborators of the applying networks, gathering perspectives on governance and collaboration dynamics and community relationships. The combination enabled us to direct funding where it’s most needed, and to partners with the community trust and capacity to steward it effectively.

What we’re seeing: Critical investment opportunities

Several clear opportunities for investment emerged across the 100+ pre-applications:

• Building capacity beyond technology. Under-resourced institutions need more than technical infrastructure. They need skilled personnel (e.g. data stewards, system engineers), data literacy programs, and financial runway to test new platforms. Investments that address these interconnected capacity needs alongside technology can unlock adoption at scale.
• Connecting fragmented ecosystems. Every region has built valuable infrastructure, but much of it operates in silos: disconnected repositories, inconsistent metadata standards, and limited interoperability. There's substantial opportunity to increase research impact by making existing infrastructure work together more effectively, enabling researchers to discover resources, reuse datasets, and build collaborations across institutional boundaries.
• Strengthening sustainability thinking early. Many proposals articulated strong technical visions but deferred sustainability planning to later implementation phases. There's a significant opportunity to support networks in developing viable business models from the start — helping them think through who pays, why they would pay, and pricing and financing models that adapt to local economic realities. Early investment in sustainability planning can make the difference between infrastructure that thrives long-term and infrastructure that struggles after initial funding ends.
• Addressing governance and building trust. Complex legal frameworks around data sharing, fragmented policy landscapes, and sovereignty concerns represent fundamental questions about who controls research infrastructure, who benefits from it, and whether communities can trust it. Several proposals were explicitly building regional alternatives to address these concerns — important work that deserves support and can strengthen the entire ecosystem's legitimacy.

We also saw considerable regional expertise, established community relationships, and innovative network approaches to local contexts. Networks that might not appear "ready" by conventional metrics often had something more valuable: community trust and strategic positioning within their regions.

Sustainable infrastructure requires different approaches in different places, and there's no universal template. What works for a North American consortium might be entirely inappropriate for an African network. This is something we’re looking forward to continuing to learn as we move into strategic support with our funded networks.

Next steps

The IOI Fund for Network Adoption, supported by Wellcome, Digital Science, the Kahle Austin Foundation, Karger Publishers Foundation, Arcadia, EBSCO, and other private donors, provides multi-year funding paired with strategic support from the IOI team.

As Kaitlin Thaney, IOI's Executive Director, notes: “We keep hearing from communities that what they need is more than just funding — it's longer runways, strategic partnership, and support that could match the scale of their ambitions. The IOI Fund for Network Adoption is our response. These are our largest grants yet, paired with dynamic resourcing and dedicated strategic support embedded throughout. We're providing fractional staffing from our team of strategists working alongside local teams to increase capacity and impact. This funding may not solve everything, but combined with that partnership, we hope it moves networks more thoughtfully and sustainably toward ambitious multi-year goals.”

If your foundation or organization is interested in supporting open infrastructure adoption, whether in specific regions, around particular technologies, or focused on certain communities, we'd welcome a conversation. We have a current, detailed understanding of the landscape and a strong, global pool of networks ready for partnership. Please contact Emma Green, IOI’s Director of Development, at emma@investinopen.org.