Invest in Open Infrastructure: 2021/22 Year-in-review

"This past year can be best described as one of growth, transition, and calibration. At this point last year, we were hiring our first core staff members, approving an ambitious three-year strategic plan, and working with our inaugural Steering Committee to almost completely turn over our governance membership. All of these pieces of organizational growth aligned to usher in a new phase of IOI – one where we had the runway and the permission to dive deep into building the evidence base, structures, and representation needed to support a vision rooted in challenging the systems of funding and supporting research at a fundamental level.... Research and analysis: In the past year, we worked on the following research projects: Costs of Open Infrastructure, where we mapped the costs of open infrastructure by surveying public fiscal and organizational data and conducting in-depth interviews with funders, institutional leads, and open infrastructure service providers. Funding Open Infrastructure, where we improved our understanding of the open infrastructure funding landscape, through assessing the available funding data sources and aggregating this information. Future of Open Scholarship, where we partnered with a network of institutional decision makers to identify opportunities, leverage points, costs, and approaches to further open scholarship. Defining Open Scholarly Infrastructure, where we examined a body of literature to develop a framework for understanding the characteristics and dimensions of open scholarly infrastructure..... Community engagement: We coordinate with stakeholders to increase the sustainability of the sector, as a trusted third-party and partner, outlining with key stakeholders interventions and plans to evolve funding and resourcing for the sector. Over the past year, we focused on iteratively developing spaces, processes, and tools for us to more effectively and meaningfully engage with our stakeholders: In August 2021, we convened the Community Oversight Council, an independent, non-voting governing body of IOI, to surface themes, trends, and issues in the open research and scholarship infrastructure sector and adjacent spaces, to provide a collaborative, safe forum for discussions, and to advise and inform IOI staff and Steering Committee on mechanisms to ensure that IOI’s work is serving our community. In February 2022, we started biweekly updates on our blog to share what we are working on, who we are talking to, and what we are reading more widely. We held our first quarterly Collaborator Calls in April 2022, with the aim to create a collaborative space for stakeholders to co-design and advance a shared roadmap towards “open infrastructure as a default in research”. To broaden our perspectives and help grow awareness of diverse open infrastructure efforts, we developed the Open Infrastructure Tracking Project (OITP). We recently launched a Twitter account for OITP, with the aim to build towards a community-sourced newsfeed for open infrastructure-related news and commentary.... Future plans: ... We continue to explore business models that both diversify our support levels and work with institutions, government funders, philanthropic entities, and others....This year, we will be deepening our research and testing of a variety of funding models for IOI that are in service of our mission to grow the investment and adoption of open infrastructure in research and scholarship. This includes exploring earned revenue and support models, feasibility studies into collective funding mechanisms to pilot..."