A Global Coalition of Non-Profits and Institutions Launch “Invest in Open Infrastructure” (IOI) Initiative

Updated Post (July 30 2019) ARL Signs On as Supporter of “Invest in Open Infrastructure” Initiative

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One Sentence Description

An effort to enable durable, scalable, and long lasting open scientific and scholarly infrastructure to emerge, thrive, and deliver its benefits on a global scale.

From Today’s Launch Announcement:

Today [May 14, 2019] we are announcing the formation of Invest In Open Infrastructure (IOI) a global initiative to increase the availability and sustainability of open knowledge infrastructure.

The needs of today’s diverse scholarly communities are not being met by the existing largely uncoordinated scholarly infrastructure, which is dominated by vendor products that take ownership of the scholarly process and data without appropriate governance and oversight from the communities they serve. We imagine a world in which communities of researchers, scholars, and knowledge workers across the globe are fully enabled to share, discover, and collaborate using tools and platforms that are designed to interoperate and complement one another rather than compete and exclude.

IOI will consist of two functions, one is an assessment and recommendation framework that will regularly survey the landscape of open scholarly infrastructure with respect to its functionality, usage, health and financial needs and make funding recommendations for that infrastructure.

IOI’s second function will coordinate funds to follow the recommendations of the framework. Coordinating financial resources from institutions, agencies and foundations, we will work to increase the overall funding available to emerging and critical infrastructure.

IOI grew out of last year’s Joint Roadmap for Open Scholarly Tools (JROST) and within the context of Plan S, the European Open Science Cloud, the US NAS Open Science by Design effort, SCOSS, AmeliCA, and the UC Declaration of Rights and Principles to Transform Scholarly Communication. It’s clear that while the advances of digital scholarship have resulted in many benefits, that scientists and scholars who generally work in the public interest have a need for more open infrastructure which mirrors their social focus.

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With this announcement, IOI:

• Calls for feedback on our aims and goals, which today are posted on our website at investinopen.org.
• Invites you to add your institution’s support for this initiative.
• Invites you to contribute to the Census of Scholarly Communication Infrastructure.
• Invites you to join one of our scheduled webinars which will provide a deeper dive on IOI.
• Asks that you subscribe to receive further information if you’re interested.

As next steps we will be securing funding to support several leadership positions, and will be recruiting in both Europe, the United States and beyond.

Read the Complete Launch Announcement

See Also: Statement: Invest in Open Infrastructure: A Concept (1265 words)

Some Coalition Members (as of May 14, 2019)

Direct to Complete List of Supporting Organizations

Examples of Open Community Infrastructure Projects

• DISCOVERY / INTERFACE:
  • Blacklight
  • IIIF
  • VIVO
• APPLICATION:
  • Samvera
  • Islandora
• REPOSITORY:
  • DSpace
  • Fedora
• PRESERVATION:
  • APTrust
  • Digital Preservation Network
  • Software Preservation Network

Additional Materials

Official IOI Announcement from SPARC: Investing in Open Scholarly Infrastructure: a Community Opportunity

Filed under: Associations and Organizations, Data Files, Digital Preservation, Funding, Management and Leadership, News, Open Access, Preservation, Reports