Foreword

The funding disruptions that made headlines last year were real, and we have documented them carefully in this report. But the story I most want to tell is not the one that made the news.The loud disruptions – the cancelled federal grants, the agencies dismantled, the program closures that generated urgent email threads and emergency convenings – those were visible. What concerns me more is what has been happening quietly alongside them. The US$5,000 or US$10,000 institutional membership that got cut as a discretionary line item, multiplied across dozens of universities making decisions that were reasonable in isolation, but without knowing what anyone else in the same consortium was doing. The program officers who built years of knowledge of this space and then moved on, taking with them the relationships and context that take years to rebuild. The in-kind institutional support that absorbs significant costs for open infrastructure while remaining invisible in any formal accounting, quietly eroding as positions go unfilled and staff take on broader portfolios. None of those things generated a press release. Together, they may matter more than the ones that did.

I want this year’s report to help the field see clearly that the challenge facing open infrastructure is structural and distributed, not reducible to any one political moment or national funding crisis. We track funding to open infrastructures across dozens of funders and jurisdictions, and the patterns that concern us are showing up across contexts that have very little else in common. Funding flows to the researchers using open infrastructure far more readily than it flows to the infrastructure itself. Priorities consistently skew toward new development and away from the operational costs that keep existing systems running. Underneath all of that is an assumption, shared across funders and institutions and developers alike, that someone else is handling the baseline.

That assumption is increasingly wrong, and the consequences are starting to show up in the data.

I am proud to share our team’s latest analysis with you, produced for the first time with sponsorship from our community that wants to see these numbers and stories. In particular, we thank Crossref for being the first to step up and put their money where their values are. That affirmation from the community helped us develop this report amidst a lot of noise, funding disruptions, political shifts, and the constant churn of an ecosystem that never stops moving. The analysis is grounded in the open infrastructures tracked in our Infra Finder discovery tool, which catalogs over 100 open infrastructures serving research and scholarship globally, alongside publicly available grant funding data and signals from our broader work. What follows is not a comfortable read in every respect. We have tried to be honest about what the data shows rather than what the field might prefer to hear, and some of what we see is genuinely concerning.

What the data shows, most plainly, is that high citation is not the same as adequate support. The most relied-upon systems in the research ecosystem are not necessarily the best funded. Free to use does not mean zero risk. It means the risk is less visible, and often displaced onto the next grant cycle, the next institutional budget decision, the next program officer who inherits a relationship and has to rebuild context from scratch. Responsibility has been passed around the same small table for a long time, with each player making a reasonable argument for why it belongs to someone else. The data in this report help make visible what that passing of this responsibility has actually cost.