The state of open infrastructure grant funding

Introduction

In support of IOI’s mission “to drive informed, strategic, and coordinated investment in and adoption of open infrastructure,” we aim to deepen our collective understanding of investment in the sector. IOI’s 2024 research into the characteristics of and sources of financial support [1]for open infrastructure (OI) showed that direct financial contributions, including grants, are the primary source of support for many OIs. We build upon our analysis of grant funding in last year’s State of Open Infrastructure report by including more funders and more OIs in our awards dataset, continuing to examine the importance of OIs in supporting other sponsored research, and attempting to put OI grant funding from US federal funders into the context of current events in the US. Our updated dataset includes 641 awards totaling approximately $550M USD, from 2001 through late 2024. As we did last year, we include awards made directly to OIs (“direct” awards) as well as awards that express a reliance on OI but are made to some other recipient (“adjacent” awards) or support the adoption of an OI (“adoption” awards). We conclude with a discussion of some of the general challenges in collecting and analysing grant funding data and what would improve matters.

Methods

Our full data collection and preparation methods are described in detail in the documentation that accompanies the raw data — this is available for download.[2]We encourage readers to explore the full documentation for additional information on how we processed the data, as well as key assumptions and their likely trade offs. Also note two blog posts describing the challenges we encountered in collecting [3]and processing [4]the data.

We focused on funder-reported and centrally reported data as the sources of record, adding several new funders to our list from last year’s report. We focused our data collection on the more than 70 OIs that had been invited to participate in IOI’s Infra Finder by 30 September, 2024, and had complete entries by 14 January, 2025. We continue to focus on OIs included in Infra Finder in order to be able to leverage the additional data available there.

Briefly, we:

1. Harvested data directly from funders’ websites when it was available, from OpenAIRE, from usaspending.gov, from 360giving, and in the case of one funder, reviewed their US Internal Revenue Service 990 forms. [5]
2. Added awards from IOI’s earlier dataset[6] that we did not capture with our current methods.
3. Searched the data using a predefined list of search terms to search the description, title, and recipient of each award, and interpreted a match in any of these fields to indicate that an award was of plausible interest. We then manually reviewed award titles and descriptions to determine whether they were relevant and excluded those which had no clear relationship to any of the OIs of interest. Duplicate awards were also excluded from the final dataset (although deduplication is fraught with challenges[7]).
4. Converted all award amounts to USD; all amounts in this report are in USD.
5. Assigned each award to a category based on its title and description, as follows:
   1. Direct awards flow to an OI, and are further categorized as research and development, operations, and other.
   2. Adjacent awards do not flow to an OI but support an activity that makes use of a particular OI, either as an end user (depositing a research work to an open repository, for example), or extending or building upon existing infrastructure, independently of the community that supports it.
   3. Adoption awards support the adoption of a particular OI by an individual user or community of users.
   4. Awards with insufficient information to be classified are categorized as “unknown.”
   5. We identified multi-recipient awards if we could, based on the award description or information provided to us by individual OIs. We did count multi-recipient awards for each named OI, wherever total counts are reported. Because we almost never knew how the funds were distributed among collaborators, the amounts were not counted in any totals for each OI.

Results and discussion

General characteristics of OI funding

The 641 grant awards in our 2025 dataset provided a total of approximately $550M in support to OIs and activities making use of open infrastructure (Table 1). 178 awards provided direct support from 23 funders to 42 OIs, accounting for about one-third of all funding (Figure 1A). These direct support awards totaled $191,744,420, representing about $17M more than what we compiled in the 2024 dataset. Of the amount of funding that goes to direct support, nearly two-thirds is used for research and development, 20% is used for operations, and the rest for other activities such as events, business planning, etc. (Figure 1B). While we did simplify our categorization of awards in this year’s reports, this distribution of funding is very similar to what we found last year. [8]

Note that not all awards had amount information, some had an amount of zero, and some we were not able to categorize.

The top recipients of direct support in our dataset are Europe PMC, Open Science Framework (OSF), OpenEdition, and arXiv (Table 2). Datacite was the receiving institution for a number of large multi-recipient awards, but we exclude multi-recipient awards from this table because in most cases we have no information about how the award is distributed among collaborators.

The top funders providing direct support to the OIs we looked at are listed in Table 3. The European Commission tops the list, due primarily to the previously mentioned multi-recipient awards made to Datacite and its collaborators as well as support for Europe PMC and OAPEN Library. Across the larger funders based in the EU the top recipients of direct support are Datacite and its collaborators, Europe PMC, and OpenEdition. Among US-based funders, the top recipients are Open Science Framework (OSF), Fedora, and Dryad (Figure 2B).

Adjacent funding

We define “Adjacent” awards as awards that are made to projects that utilize open infrastructure in some way. This could be as significant as developing new applications that make use of or interact with existing infrastructure, the use of the entire corpus hosted in an open repository for research purposes, or simply depositing a dataset or preprint to an open repository. This type of support may provide an important signal of the overall impact of open infrastructure by quantifying just how much research activity the existence (and openness) of open infrastructure makes possible. Within the bounds of our dataset, when we compare the direct support to OIs with the research activity they support (as measured by the sum of adjacent awards for that OI), OIs appear to offer sound return on investment in terms of the activity they enable (Table 4).

We could also examine whether funders of the users of OI also fund those OIs directly. For example, the top two OIs named in Adjacent awards are Open Science Framework (OSF) and Dryad. Yet when we compare the amount of Direct and Adjacent funding from the same source, there is a noticeable lack of alignment (Table 5, 6). Where the total amount of “adjacent” activity far exceeds direct investment by a funder, it’s worth asking whether it is also in the funder’s interest to assume more responsibility for supporting the infrastructure their grantees depend on.

The potential impact of federal funding instability in the US

The federal funding landscape in the US is experiencing considerable upheaval and uncertainty. The situation is evolving so rapidly that virtually any summary will be out of date almost immediately, but the situation as of early to mid-March 2025 illustrates some of the challenges even as the specifics continue to evolve:

• The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been strongly targeted and provides a useful example of the challenges to research funding. In February 2025, the NIH was blocked from publishing notices[9]of review activities in the Federal Register as is required by law before review meetings can be held, bringing review of grant proposals to a halt. The agency was also directed to limit indirect costs charged to research grants to 15%.[10] Indirect cost rates typically range from 30-70% [11]and reflect the real cost of supporting research at a university. These charges support shared infrastructure and services, including the cost of facilities and their upkeep, research administration (including regulatory compliance), information technology support, and more.
• Federal funders have also been instructed to identify and stop funding awards supporting activities deemed to be at odds with the priorities of the current administration, including “projects studying transgender populations, gender identity, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the scientific workforce, environmental justice and any other research that might be perceived to discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity.”[12] Some orders have been declared invalid by judges[13] who have ordered that funding be released, but it remains unclear whether the executive branch has been complying.

This ongoing uncertainty presents multiple challenges to open infrastructure. First, significant direct financial support from US federal funding sources is in jeopardy. Table 7 lists the total amount of funding from US federal funders for awards in our dataset with an end date of 1 January 2025 or later. Our cut-off end date is somewhat arbitrary (but we think reasonable) given the fairly common practice of requesting a no-cost extension for award activities that continue past a grant’s original end date, if funds remain. We found one active award for each of the OIs listed, and award duration ranges from one to seven years. To put this potential loss into perspective, arXiv reports annual operating costs of $2.3-3.4M for fiscal years 2023 and 2024 (from their 2023 annual report [14]) and Dryad reports operating expenses of $0.9-1.5M for fiscal years 2022 and 2023.[15]Notably, nearly all of the OIs with active federal funding play an important role in the free and open dissemination of research results.

Second, the research activity that relies on open infrastructure is experiencing the same uncertainty and potential loss of funds due to the termination of current funded projects as well as reductions in future funding. For OIs that operate with any measure of cost recovery from their users, this makes financial planning difficult and may result in a loss of revenue.

Third, the threat of dramatic decreases to “overhead” charges will exert substantial budgetary pressure on colleges and universities. They will be looking for cost savings, potentially resulting in a decrease in membership or other types of contributions to OIs. It is encouraging that some philanthropies recognize the crisis[16] and are increasing their giving; whether this will benefit OIs directly remains to be seen.

The need for more (and more standardized) funding data

We think we bring significant value to conversations around funding for open infrastructure and its use. That said, we wish we could conduct a comprehensive analysis of funding across the sector. We discussed in a pair of 2025 blogposts some of the challenges in collecting [17] and preparing and analysing [18] this type of data, and advocated for widespread endorsement and adoption of the Barcelona Declaration on Open Research Information and its principles. Sharing grant award metadata in open and standards-compliant repositories and transfer systems, with permissive licensing, would support the discovery and reuse of this information. Invest in Open Infrastructure is a supporter of the Barcelona Declaration, and we encourage others to support and adopt its principles.

Data availability statement

The grant awards data used for the analysis presented here (Riordan et al 2025) is available online: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15198421.

Interactive dashboards allowing direct exploration of the data are available at https://investinopen.org/ data-room/grant-funding-data-dashboard/.

Questions or concerns? Please contact us at research@investinopen.org.

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Footnotes

1. https://investinopen.org/state-of-open-infrastructure-2024/sooi-characteristics-2024/
2. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15198421
3. https://investinopen.org/blog/sooi-2025-funding-data-collection-challenges
4. https://investinopen.org/blog/sooi-2025-funding-data-analysis-challenges
5. Form 990 is filed annually by tax-exempt organizations in the US and lists grants made.
6. https://zenodo.org/records/7259472
7. https://investinopen.org/blog/sooi-2025-funding-data-analysis-challenges
8. https://investinopen.org/state-of-open-infrastructure-2024/sooi-grant-funding-2024/
9. https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/02/22/nx-s1-5305276/trump-nih-funding-freeze-medical-research
10. https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-068.html
11. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-possible-long-term-impact-of-trumps-cuts-to-medical-research-funding
12. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00703-1
13. https://www.statnews.com/2025/03/05/nih-indirect-costs-lawsuit-federal-judge-extends-order-blocking-trump-cuts/
14. https://info.arxiv.org/about/reports/2023_arXiv_annual_report.pdf
15. https://github.com/datadryad/governance/blob/main/annual-reports/990s/Dryad%20FY%202023%20990.pdf
16. https://apnews.com/article/macarthur-foundation-endowment-payout-increase-d371dede7ca34830d4653b949e90c647
17. https://investinopen.org/blog/sooi-2025-funding-data-collection-challenges
18. https://investinopen.org/blog/sooi-2025-funding-data-analysis-challenges