Foreword

What a time to be writing a foreword on critical infrastructure for research and scholarship. When I first joined IOI, the world was rapidly going into a state of lockdown, economic collapse, and shifts to virtual learning and work. Openness was in the news as a necessary condition to spur innovation and development of life-saving vaccines and treatments; infrastructure and equity were terms and concepts inserted into global policy discussions, funding proposals, new programs, and organizations like ours.

In the five years since IOI formally launched, we have delved deep into the conditions and communities surrounding open infrastructure to power the research ecosystem and civil society.

Today, we’re proud to share our second annual State of Open Infrastructure report and peel back on the analysis and research our team conducts to power our work to drive investment in and adoption of the tools and systems research relies on.

At IOI, we have long wrestled with what makes an open tool, protocol, platform, system, or network an “open infrastructure.” The term is particularly important for us; not only is it in our name, it also resides at the core of our mission to increase investment in and adoption of open infrastructure.

While we have come to no single, let alone strict, definition of the term, we have often returned to a key element, a kind of “true north” that stands out as we try to differentiate between what is and is not open infrastructure: reliance.

At IOI, we are focused on the research ecosystem, and we take “reliance” seriously. Researchers, curators, and technologists rely on open infrastructure as critical underpinnings of our information landscape. Disruption in the availability of open infrastructures in the research ecosystem can jeopardize swaths of human knowledge.

Imagine just a few of the major open infrastructures serving scholarship today: arXiv, PubMed, DSpace, Open Journal Systems, or perhaps Creative Commons. Consider how much of our memory, our knowledge trail, depends on open research infrastructures, and consider how many of these have been created on a cycle of grants and sustained on a combination of donations, membership fees, service hosting, and/or specialized development. Repositories and publishing platforms, metadata standards and persistent identifiers — as long as they all work reasonably well, most scholars, teachers, and researchers across disciplines and focal areas accept them as a given and depend on them as a reality. But these infrastructures are not, on the whole, sustainable businesses with robust fiscal models and diversified revenues. Many do not turn profits; most operate at steady losses that are absorbed by philanthropic and government funders and a variety of research institutions including labs, universities, and colleges. They operate on systems rife with technical debt, and they depend upon volunteer labour to cover much of their human costs from governance to editorial review to code development.

As we worked on this year’s State of Open Infrastructure report, we watched shifts reported on last year in our Policy report continue at a pace few could expect or even wrap their heads around. The global impacts we started to see in 2023-2024 across Europe and Latin America with political shifts and slashed budgets for science, research, and civil society took on a different intensity at the start of 2025 with many of the foundations underpinning research and knowledge production coming under attack in the US. Reductions in funding for open science had already become a widespread (and growing) problem, with the Netherlands, France, Argentina, Mexico, and others all serving as examples of funding fragility over the last few years. As we worked to reveal patterns and shine light on the investments made in open infrastructure in 2024, we became increasingly aware of how vulnerable our funding sources, which seemed maybe inadequate at times, but certainly stable, actually are.

While we’ve been writing this report, we’ve watched a dramatic change hit the US research ecosystem, with massive cancellations of federal grants and contracts numbering in the high billions of dollars, some due to their use of terms like “equity” or “diversity” in titles and descriptions, others because they were being used to study gender or sexuality under a new administration that is working to eradicate those terms. We’ve watched USAID be dismantled. We’ve seen NEH and IMLS virtually shuttered, and widespread termination of grants across many federal agencies. We’ve witnessed direct attacks on universities, including active proposals to slash the standard indirect cost rate for federal grants to fifteen percent (barely a third of what is typically negotiated), which would decimate support for facilities, infrastructure to conduct research, and other critical staffing. We have long stated that open infrastructure requires better forms and  mechanisms of investment, that open infrastructure needs more adoption. We’ve questioned leading myths like “open = free” and that there’s not enough money to fund open infrastructure.

And today — as we launch the State of Open Infrastructure 2025, which of course mostly covers funding and activity through December 2024 — we are challenged to describe what we think the open infrastructure landscape might look like by this time next year.

That brings us back to reliance. The open tools and systems we rely upon need our immediate attention and action. We continue to reaffirm our commitment to a vision where every place of higher learning has access to the tools and infrastructure necessary to engage and participate in research. This report is a tool, one that brings attention to the current state of open infrastructure and that highlights actions we might take to radically improve that state. So much is needed to build that better future we seek, where open infrastructure is truly supported and sustained. We’re hard at work, as we know so many of you are as well — let’s use this moment, together, to make open the default for knowledge.

In appreciation,

Kaitlin Thaney,

Executive Director, Invest in Open Infrastructure