Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) Announces Launch of Infra Finder: “Your Hub for Finding Infrastructure Services Enabling Open Research and Scholarship”

Posted by Admin April 22, 2024 Infra

From an Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) Post:

Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) is thrilled to announce the launch of our latest resource: Infra Finder. This tool is designed to be the go-to resource for anyone navigating the complex landscape of infrastructure services and standards enabling open research and scholarship.

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Infra Finder currently offers a database that features a wealth of information about 57 infrastructure services and standards that showcase the variety in open practices that enable the open sharing of research data and publications.

From repository software to persistent identifiers, Infra Finder provides information on services’ technical attributes, community engagement mechanisms, governance, key policies, and more – to help you discover and identify the infrastructure services that fit your and your institution’s requirements.

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How did you choose the first group of services to be included in Infra Finder?
For the current release, we decided to focus on infrastructure services enabling the sharing of research data and publications. This is a shared focus across all of our current core programmes of work. It allows us to better align our research, community engagement, and strategic support efforts. We see increasing the visibility of infrastructure services in this area and advancing their adoption as key to furthering the aims of policies including the Nelson memo in the US and UNESCO’s Recommendation on Open Science. Within this focus, we invited 84 service providers to participate. Some of these 84 services expressed interest in being part of the tool, and others we are engaging with through ongoing research efforts (e.g. the “reasonable costs” project). Out of the 84 providers, we received responses from 57 services. This is just the beginning – we will continue to add more infrastructure services to Infra Finder. If you are interested in adding your infrastructure service to Infra Finder, please see this page for more information.

How does Infra Finder relate to other registries, assessment tools, and values and principles frameworks in the scholarly communication and research data space?
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 Scholarly Communication Technology Catalogue (SComCAT), the Principles of Open Scholarship Infrastructure (POSI), the FOREST framework, re3data, fairsharing.org, the EOSC marketplace, and many others. We are grateful to all who have contributed to these resources. In creating Infra Finder, we chose to take a solutions-oriented, user-driven approach to increase the adoption of open infrastructure in a scalable way. For more about this approach, please refer to our documentation on Infra Finder’s background.