Announcing the Catalog of Open Infrastructure Services

"I'm excited to announce the launch of the Catalog of Open Infrastructure Services (COIs). This resource is the culmination of research, interviews, and analysis of a sampling of open infrastructure projects serving the research community. (Click here to access the catalog.)... We firmly believe that to make the decision to invest into open infrastructure a competitive and reliable choice for institutions, we need to better understand the underlying costs, economics, and key dimensions to guide decision-making. Data on current investment in the sector - from external funders, institutions, and projects themselves - is at best disaggregated and at worst incomplete. We heard from over 120 members of the research community via our Future of Open Scholarship research as well as focus groups with decision makers conducted specifically for this work that more information was needed to guide these decisions in an accessible, standardized, and coordinated form. We heard that time spent individually conducting due diligence on new tools varied greatly due to external budget pressures, decision making structures, and urgency. This often led to decisions to adopt commercial offerings due to expediency and efficiency to meet the needs of the research community. COIs is designed as a resource for funders, users, and other interested stakeholders looking to make informed decisions about the open infrastructure services available for research and scholarship. We want to support the ongoing conversations about important issues of financing, governance, and administration of open infrastructure by advancing our mutual understanding of key issues in providing important services and building an ecosystem of reliable, resilient, and community-driven infrastructure supporting a global community of researchers, scholars, and other users. We are also proud to announce that in order to achieve these goals, we are including new assessment criteria for open infrastructures that go beyond typical market-driven indicators.   For more information, check out this section on data sources utilized in this work and Frequently Asked Questions. ..."