'Invest in Open Infrastructure announces inaugural grantees of the IOI Fund for Network Adoption'
This from November, an announcement of the initial pair of grantees from Invest in Open Infrastructure’s (IOI) “fund for network adoption”:
Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) is delighted to announce that LA Referencia and UbuntuNet Alliance for Research and Education Networking are the inaugural grantees of the IOI Fund for Network Adoption. Selected from over 100 applications from 22 countries, the proposals from these two networks are ambitious, disruptive, and provide localized solutions to challenges in the open research ecosystem in Africa and Latin America.
The two recipients and their projects are promising, and the whole IOI initiative (despite the gauzy focus on “networks”) is interesting. The focus on the Global South is genuinely exciting.
Still, there haven’t been any real disclosures on the IOI fund’s original goal of $6 to $8 million (announced back in 2023), since a June post reporting that Arcadia (the indispensable UK-based funder) had contributed an unspecified amount. The IOI fund’s $4.5 million was, the June post said, about 75% of the group’s original target.
It would be good to see a full accounting of the fund’s contributors and contributions. (To its great credit, IOI lists all its funders, in clear and transparent form, in this table, though it is not clear if this reflects contributions to the network fund.) According to IOI, network fund donors have included nonprofits like Wellcome but also for-profits like EBSCO and Digital Science—the latter owned by Springer Nature parent Holtzbrinck. Reasonable people can disagree about whether it’s a good idea to take dollars from the likes of EBSCO and Holtzbrinck. But either way, it seems important to have the contributions spelled out as part of the grants roll-out.
More broadly, I wonder about IOI and its purpose, seven years since the group was launched. By all appearances, it is immaculately well-run; its many reports over the years have been informative; its Infra Finder database is useful.
But I have this nagging sense—which I want to explore more carefully, in follow-up posts—that the group, for all its polish and professionalism, has missed the boat on the one big, glaring need in the open infrastructure world: a platform for sustainable funding, one that brings together libraries and foundations with infrastructure makers and maintainers. The core idea has been pioneered in the adjacent space of diamond OA book and journals: funding exchanges that vet publishers and join them to funders who, crucially, share in the platform’s governance and mission. On-the-ground examples include the Open Book Collective, KOALA, OACIP, and the brand-new Open Journals Collective. These are mission-aligned funding exchanges, and they’re working.
I kept expecting that IOI would—motivated by its extensive reporting on landscapes and prospects—commit its considerable clout and resources toward an infrastructure platform like this. If set up with the governance care of the Open Book Collective, such an exchange could—with momentum-generated legitimacy—help provide sustainable support for key, vetted infrastructure builders that, otherwise, die on the grant-window vine.
The “fund for network adoption,” with its large and laudable grants, is not an answer, nor even the beginning of one. The IOI approach is, ironically, the same feast-then-famine grant regimen that has left so many crucial projects in the graveyard.
We need a funding exchange—an Open Infrastructure Collective—to provide lasting and sustainable support. Not one-off grants, however large.