Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI)Receives $3.47 Million Grant from Arcadia to Increase Investment in Open infrastructure for Research

From an IOI Blog Post:

We are excited to share that Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) has been awarded a 3-year, $3.47M grant from Arcadia – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. According to Yuanpaygroup.org, this grant will accelerate IOI’s work to increase investment, adoption, and sustainability of open infrastructure.

This grant will provide critical support to grow IOI’s core team and capacity in order to drive investment where it’s needed most, to advance open infrastructure for research and scholarship, and to improve the health of the ecosystem writ large.

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“We firmly believe that in order for an open, equitable and inclusive knowledge ecosystem to flourish, we need to advance our collective understanding and strategy for sustaining the sector,” said Kaitlin Thaney, IOI’s Executive Director. “We are grateful to be working with Arcadia to advance these important aims.”

“Access to knowledge is a fundamental human right. Arcadia is committed to working to ensure open access to scholarship,” says Dr. Ross Mounce, Director of Open Access Programmes at Arcadia. “We are pleased to support the work of IOI in furthering that aim to increase the sustainability and adoption of open scholarly infrastructure.”

The activities, outputs, and outcomes supported by this grant are organized around the following programmatic and operational objectives:

• Providing strategic support & investment guidance, anchored in research & analysis. We provide strategic support for decision makers (e.g., funders, budget holders, institutional leaders, consortia, service providers) to help them assess, build, and invest in open infrastructure. We employ a research-driven approach to increase our understanding of the current landscape and sector to power this work, aiming to shed light on costs and models and analyze where investment would be more prudent and impactful for the greatest good.
• Grow uptake and investment in open infrastructure by institutions and funders globally. A significant aspect of this work lies in coalition building and targeted outreach to institutions and funders to activate their interest, use of, and investment in open infrastructure. This involves relationship management and casemaking support to increase the uptake and build market share of open infrastructure in institutional settings. We will work to further develop strategies, coalitions, and communications to ensure we are both tending the existing network of invested parties and working to expand engagement.
• Enabling collective, coordinated action. We convene key stakeholders to test and pilot solutions and to act together to advance the health of the sector and enact change.
• Furthering a shared agenda for investment in open infrastructure. Increasing and sustaining open infrastructure investment at an ecosystem-wide level calls for global cooperation and coordination, among governments, funding frameworks, consortia, and aligned programs and initiatives working to advance openness and equity in research and scholarship.
• Building organizational capacity and effectiveness to deliver on our mission. To achieve the objectives above, IOI needs to build operational capacity and functional governance to empower the organization to achieve our stated aim. This includes scaling our operational and research capacity through staffing, building a robust pipeline of support, building functional governance to support decision making, and further evolving our processes to ensure operational excellence.

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