Authors: Emmy Tsang, Chrys Wu (Infra Finder)
Reviewers: Elena Sokolova, Tomasz Umerle
The challenge of finding the right infrastructure solution
Open infrastructures — shared systems and resources supporting the creation, sharing, and preservation of research output and knowledge — are becoming increasingly crucial in the rapidly evolving world of research and scholarship. However, navigating this complex and dynamic landscape can be challenging for institutions and organisations:
- Which solutions are open-source, community-governed, distribute open-access content, and/or are free to use by anyone?
- What does a solution integrate with?
- Are there hosting / vended options available?
Furthermore, information about the infrastructure services is scattered across multiple web pages and sometimes out of date. This makes it time-consuming and challenging for people looking to evaluate or compare infrastructures to find the ones that best suit their research communities’ needs.
“I only know about (Zenodo) because of a friend of mine… even if we said, hey, we haven’t done an analysis yet, but here are the ones (repository services) we are looking at — this helps me understand what we should assess.”
— Representative at an institution, from Infra Finder user interviews
Infra Finder: a discovery and evaluation tool to suit your needs
Created by the Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) team, Infra Finder is a tool that helps institutions and libraries discover and evaluate open infrastructures by providing:
- Verified information on over 90 open infrastructures: one tool covering 30 solution categories, from repository software to digital preservation systems, authoring tools to data management planning tools and services. The number of open infrastructures and solution categories continues to grow as IOI methodically target specific areas of the open infrastructure landscape.
- Targeted filtering: refine options based on specific criteria such as solution category, open attributes, technical attributes, community engagement mechanisms, business models, and hosting options. Quickly and easily identify solutions that align with your priorities and requirements.
- Comparison tool: evaluate up to four solutions side-by-side and share results with key stakeholders at your organization for discussion and strategic planning.
As examples, you can explore the Infra Finder profiles of infrastructures from the OPERAS community:
Centering users’ needs in designing Infra Finder
Infra Finder is built on previous and current efforts to map and bring visibility to the landscape of infrastructure services and technologies for research and scholarship. It was also heavily inspired by existing registries, and values and principles frameworks in the space. These efforts include the Mapping the Scholarly Communication Landscape 2019 Census and bibliographic scan, Scholarly Communication Technology Catalogue (SComCAT), The FOREST Framework for Values-Driven Scholarly Communication, The Principles of Open Scholarship Infrastructure (POSI), The HELIOS Scholarly Communication Infrastructure Guide, re3data, fairsharing.org, Open Access Publishing Tools, 400+ Tools and Innovations in Scholarly Communication, and others. The IOI team is grateful to all who have contributed to these resources.
In creating Infra Finder, IOI chose to take a solutions-oriented, user-driven approach to increase the adoption of open infrastructure in a scalable way. In designing Infra Finder, the team conducted focus groups, user testing sessions, and targeted conversations with over 30 representatives from libraries and institutions to better understand users’ pain points and needs in making decisions or the case to adopt open infrastructure. The input from the focus groups and user sessions informed the design of the initial Infra Finder data collection instrument, which IOI then iteratively refined with infrastructure service providers. (You can read more about IOI’s approach in Infra Finder’s documentation and this IJDC paper.)
Up-to-date, verified information on 90+ open infrastructures
Through user engagement, IOI has also understood and validated the unique value proposition of Infra Finder: verified, reliable data. Infra Finder ensures that users can make well-informed decisions based on verified, up-to-date details about open infrastructure solutions’ openness, community governance, interoperability, hosting options, etc.
- The IOI team works closely with infrastructure service providers in the data collection process: information is provided and reviewed by the service provider, and, where possible, validated against public data by IOI team members.
- Once approved for Infra Finder, open infrastructures can update data at-will using a new self-service portal, ensuring information stays current.
“As a Community Development Manager focused on growing our member base, Infra Finder is a valuable tool. It helps raise awareness about our existence and aligns us with similar projects that people are exploring. Sharing our presence in Infra Finder lends credibility and visibility to our work. It’s exciting to see what IOI will do with this platform, and it’s a great way for developers to see their efforts recognized in the broader ecosystem.”
— Zoe Wake Hyde, Knowledge Commons
Share your use cases and feedback today
Whether you are looking to make informed infrastructure choices or demonstrate a commitment towards open science and transparency, IOI wants Infra Finder to work for you. Please take a moment to fill in Infra FInder’s in-app survey to help them better understand your needs for discovering open solutions.
Support Infra Finder
Infra Finder is hosted and maintained by IOI, and made possible with the collaboration of the service providers, Cast Iron Coding, and the open infrastructure community.
If you develop/maintain an open infrastructure, please consider adding your infrastructure to Infra Finder — please visit this webpage for more information on eligibility and a link to the Expression of Interest form.
If you discovered an infrastructure by using Infra Finder, please consider supporting that infrastructure directly through a membership or contribution to their work. You can find out more about how to do so by visiting the infrastructure’s solution page on Infra Finder.
If you find Infra Finder useful and want to support IOI’s efforts to bring you value through the tool, please consider supporting IOI’s work to develop and maintain this resource. You can make a one-time donation on this page or join IOI’s Sustaining Circle.
About the authors
Dr. Emmy Tsang, Director of Finance and Operations, Invest in Open Infrastructure
Emmy currently leads the Operations team at IOI and manages financial planning and operational processes to ensure efficiency and alignment in support of IOI’s mission. She is passionate about fostering open science and equitable innovation, and building the scaffolds for that. At OLS, the TU Delft Library, and eLife, she has led initiatives in finance management, communication, and community building to advance open science practices and open-source tool development.
Chrys Wu, Product Lead, Invest in Open Infrastructure
Over the course of an intrepid career, Chrys Wu has been a product manager, strategist, journalist, and consigliere, working with organizations including GitHub, O’Reilly Media, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, DataKind, The Knight Foundation, and The Gates Foundation. She is driven to help people at scale. Her career has placed her at the intersection of information flow, human-centered systems design, and product development. In addition to her work with established entities, she also co-founded Hacks/Hackers, which supports innovation in journalism at a local and global level; and Write/Speak/Code, a peer-led professional development network for marginalized genders in technology.