librarypunk - 128 - Invest in Open Infrastructure

Episode Date: April 22, 2024

In an ep to coincide with the release of Infra Finder, we’re joined by Chrys and Lauren from Invest in Open Infrastructure to talk about the release, open source challenges, IT supply chains, and more! https://investinopen.org/ https://infrafinder.investinopen.org https://investinopen.org/blog/blog-introducing-infra-finder/  Reasonable Costs projects: https://investinopen.org/blog/the-cost-and-price-of-public-access-to-research-data/ http://investinopen.org/blog/infra-finder-your-hub-for-finding-infrastructure-services-enabling-open-research-and-scholarship   Media mentioned UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science: https://www.unesco.org/en/open-science/about?hub=686 Nelson Memo: https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/08-2022-OSTP-Public-access-Memo.pdf Holden Memo: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/ostp_public_access_memo_2013.pdf Gates Foundation Open Access Policy: https://openaccess.gatesfoundation.org/ https://australiainstitute.org.au/report/ending-profiteering-from-publicly-funded-research/  https://www.heliosopen.org/ https://openscholarlyinfrastructure.org/ https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/scholarly-publishing/uc-open-access-policies-background/presidential/

I'm a Skullcom librarian. My pronouns are he and they? I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library and my pronouns are they them. And I'm Jay. I'm a music library director and my pronouns are he, him. And we have guests. We should like to introduce yourselves. Sure thing. My name is Chris and I am proudly at Invest in Open Infrastructure. And I work in Engagement. At Invest in Open Infrastructure and my pronouns are she or they. Welcome. Thank you. Yeah, thanks for reaching out. I have some experience with Invest in Open, particularly the in for finder, but always interested to learn more. And I'm sure other people are interested, too, because, you know, it's open source stuff related to libraries. I think we've got a perfect audience for that. Yeah, we're really glad to be here. Yep. Arthur is deciding that he's wanting a lot of attention right now.

Of course. Like, I'm getting the behind the scenes here. He likes to be in meetings. I guarantee I won't also be visited by a cat. Yeah. You want to be on the podcast, Arthur? I just realized after all of our introductions, I forgot to say, pronouns.

That's fine. And everybody does. It's a privacy blocker. He's like stuck under my microbole. There you go, buddy. All right. So I guess for people who aren't aware of I.O.I. What is it?

What's it all about? What's the mission? Yeah. Well, we're a nonprofit initiative working to increase the investment in and adoption of open infrastructure to further equitable access in or access to and participation. in research. It's a mouthful. And we do this. We have three core programs through which we do this. I can tell you a little bit more about them. One is research-driven funding pilots, and these ensure that we have a healthy, resilient, sustainable future for research and scholarship. Another is strategic support

where IOWI collaborates closely with infrastructure providers, funders, and institutions to build resilience and sustainability in the knowledge sector. And the last is our data room work, where we provide actionable practical tools and recommendations to support decision makers in adopting and investing in open infrastructure. And that would be something like InfraFinder. That's right. Okay. I guess I'm interested how did IOWI begin if you want to give us the history on it. Yeah. Lauren, do you want to talk about that? Yeah, I can talk about that a little bit. So Invest in Open Infrastructure came out of a conference called the Joint Red Map for Open Science Tools, J. Ross. And that was started in 2018, I think. And that event brought a lot folks together from a lot of different organizations, institutional leaders, publishers,

funders, software developers. And that organization went on for a few years. And Iowa was born out of that. And for a while, it was a volunteer effort. It was a group of people just doing volunteer work to kind of figure out the space and understand what was going on. But then in 2019, it was more formalized. And then our first executive director, Caitlin Daney, was hired in March 2020. And so that's how we got our start. And we've been going and doing this work ever since. Okay. Yeah. It wasn't for some reason I thought Iowa had been around a little bit longer than that. But I guess that's around when I first started hearing about it would have been that right around the time I moved into my current job. Yeah. And the folks working at Ioi have all been around and

working in this sector too and doing various projects. So, but yes, it's about 2019, 2020 that was formalized as an organization. So as an organization, what makes like I.O.I. different. than a lot of the other, you know, projects that we have going on. They're all focused on different things. There's lots of different approaches to making open infrastructure like Orchids work or making ROR's work and stuff like that. So where does IOUI fit into that? Yeah, it's a really good question. So the interesting thing to me about IOUI is that we sit at this intersection of a number of different communities that all come together.

So that includes, as I mentioned, those folks who were involved in that original J-Rost conference. So there's our, you know, funding bodies, infrastructure service, creators, and providers and workers, and the research community and librarians. And all of these folks came together at this original conference and continued to work with us, really jelled around this belief that in the shared digital infrastructure, that that is the critical key point to accelerating open science. And one of the really cool things about this team is all of our folks come from different background. So you've got Chris and me on this call and we couldn't, I think, have much more different backgrounds to how we came to IOUI. And because of that, we get these different viewpoints and different

connection places into the world of open infrastructure. And because of that, we're situated in a way that we can try different things and have different conversations with different folks that maybe other organizations, you know, they can do really deeply in one space and we can reach across reach across borders there. So some of just some of the perspectives that we often engage with are in journalism and public-private partnership spaces and of course the open science community. It's a really fun team to be part of. The journalism partnerships, is that similar to like the public library publishing local papers thing I heard about recently or is that something else? The journalism aspect comes from our executive director's background. She worked for a long time in journalism. I got her

start there, in fact, I believe, and has many connections in that space. And Chris, you also did a stand working with The New York Times, right? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, for me, you know, I think one of the things that was interesting to me about being at Iowa is that, like, I've always been interested in helping people at scale. And I did, you know, as Lauren mentioned, I did work in news. I also did developer advocacy and product management. I come from an industry background, so working with libraries. that you know, I'm working with libraries, I've been a consumer, I guess, is that the right word? Like, I've been a patron of libraries. Yeah, I've been a user of libraries, but haven't worked within libraries. But I have worked at companies like The New York Times, O'Reilly Media, and GitHub.

I also co-founded two organizations. One was hacks hackers and another called RightSpeak Code. And that brings people together at the intersection of technology and greater purpose. Yeah. So that said, open source and open data have always been important. to my work and the work of the communities that I'm a part of and finding ways to ensure that we have infrastructure that makes that access possible is important to me. So that's why I came and joined I-O-I. Yeah. Is there anything else about your background you wanted to add before I asked Lauren about? Oh, uh, since we kind of accidentally segueed into the background question. It's fine. Sorry. Um, no. Like ways are good. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's, uh, that's kind of me in a

nutshell. Okay. Lauren, how'd you get into I-O-I? Oh, I come out of the library world. So I've, you know, I have a long winding road. It started with music education. They went through a PhD in linguistics, right when academia was going into the slide down to the contract crisis and no jobs. And I did, I worked for 10 years in a large R1 academic library in scholarly communication space and in library publishing. And that gave me like a huge insight into all of the various permutations of issues with closed infrastructures and the longer I worked in that space, the more it became really evident that we need to work across organizations and across different stakeholder groups and across different kinds of organizations as well in order to really affect change. And IOWI was perfect,

perfectly situated for doing that kind of work. How did the opportunity just arrive? You know, you're going along in library land. Why move into Iowa? Yeah. So for me, I had kind of hit a spot where I had been in my job for about 10 years and it was either continue doing what I was doing or going to like administration or go to another library in a different place to do something slightly different. And I was more interested at that point in expanding my scope and seeing what I could do for other organizations with the things I had learned. through my time at the library. I was also ready for something a little bit different. So, you know, it's nice to have a fully remote work job, for example. I didn't exactly have that in my library, library position. But yeah, I just, you know, kept my eyes open. I was kind of helping a student search for a job and I saw this job pop up in my feet and I was like, wait a minute, I could do this. This is the most fun part about my current library job. Stole a job. I'm a student. Don't tell him.

No, that's great. I'm always curious how people move around because the career pathways everyone takes in libraries are always so different. It's hard to give anyone career advice at all. So I think just hearing what people end up doing is useful enough. Yeah, it's kind of an interesting thing. There's a lot of folks, I think. Well, for a time there, there were a lot of folks with PhDs or from like the sort of disciplinary academia doing work in libraries, whether that was through like digital humanities or data management.

kind of work or scholarly communication, like, for me. And so that, I was part of kind of that group of folks who didn't have a formal library background coming and working in libraries and having to learn so much from the folks around me. So it's been interesting to be one of those folks in this space. And then it's even more interesting now to go from being a librarian to being like in this nonprofit, like open source space where sometimes the roles of librarians are not exactly well understood. Yeah, I definitely, well, yeah, it's definitely, Especially when you have a mixture of infrastructure, the library software marketplace, and then, like, in an open source world, those things don't mesh together easily. We were talking about the British Library hack in the Discord. And it was like how many systems could possibly have failed and to be quarantined and had to, and didn't, right? Because it was a mishmash of a thousand different products.

Yeah, it's one of the challenges of just like operating in the world today is everything. It's all kinds of like bananas, plumbing and spaghetti that's, you know, been put together with like, what's the word, like wires and duct tape. And when things go wrong, it's really hard to, you know, suss out exactly like where, you know, pinpoint where all the issues are. So, yeah, challenge. I know you have an ongoing project investigating reasonable cost for public access to U.S. Federal. funded research and scientific data. So what's the purpose of that project? Because I'm guessing it's saying we're spending too much money in one area. We need to reallocate it in another. So yeah, sort of. So the genesis of that project, so I'm actually on the project team for this, so I can talk over Chris a little bit here. So the genesis of that project was probably our team had the same reaction that I think a lot of folks did when we were reading the Nelson memo when it came out. This is the 2022 memo from the Office of Science and Technology Policy. that mandated new guidelines for open sharing of the outputs of federally funded research.

Right. So as for me, as I was reading this, I came to this phrase that just, you know, kind of made my eyes bug out a little bit, which was reasonable costs where this, this memo basically says that like the granting, the federal grant, federal agencies should allow, it says something like, should allow researchers to include reasonable publication costs. And I was like, reasonable. Like, what does that mean? And I know a lot of my library colleagues and friends had kind of the same reaction. Like, what does that actually mean? So this, this project was born from just that phrase. Like, what does that actually mean? And what is it like in practice to try to figure that out as repository that might be hosting open research data as a researcher trying to figure out like where I can

publish and how much money I need to budget for that? And what is reasonable and what does costs even mean? So we had, so it's kind of a multi-stage process and we just released the very first part of this at the end of February. Yay, a publication. And this publication basically covered like, what is it? What it does reasonable cost. So there are these four terms. There's reasonable, allowable cost and price that people just seem to use somewhat interchangeably without really getting down to what those things actually mean underneath. And so we looked at the work of making research data publicly available in this first publication and looked at, okay, so how much does that cost? That is, what are the like resources, money, labor that makes that work available, that data available, like what you actually have to spend? And then what are the prices? So these are the prices that services might charge for doing that work. And obviously like cost and price are not the same thing, right? The price might include extra markup for, you know, supporting other programs that the organization might do. It might include, you know, maybe some long-term preservation

costs. It might include some other things. It might include profit if it's a for-prosper corporate publisher as well. So we looked at the difference between cost and price. And if I've learned anything from this project, this is to be very careful about how I use those terms of like every part of my life now. But it also looked at what does reasonable mean. And it turns out, of course, the government has a definition for what reasonable means. We actually found a reference to this in like the code of federal regulations. And so we outlined that. And that definition is really funny. It's, I have it written here. Reasonable if it does not exceed that, which would be incurred by a prudent person under the circumstances prevailing at the time the decision was made to incur the cost.

And then what does prudent mean? Right. So you could go down. this slope forever. Okay, what does prudent mean? Okay, what are the circumstances prevailing? Okay, what is this? So you can really go down this rabbit hole forever. But that is what they mean when they say reasonable. So this is this first white paper is laying out these four kind of definitions and then exploring, okay, so what are the actual costs being reported by repositories and what are the prices that they're charging and kind of looking into the literature and the available information on that. So that was like the first step. And now we're right at right now we're actively working with representatives from several different institutions. We're aiming for 30 different institutions

from across the spectrum of different kinds of universities. And we're working with them to understand, okay, so given these definitions, how are you responding to this locally? What kind of guidance are you giving to your researchers? Where are you getting your information from? Who are you collaborating with on campus? What do you need? What do you wish you had? What are your workflows? Like, is there one person doing all of this? Is it like going back and forth between offices? What does that even look like? And trying to compare across institutions to help us share knowledge. So that's the next part. We're actively working on that right now. So the only interesting thing to report from that is experiences differ wildly. So we're looking forward to releasing that later this year.

So that's the overview of the reasonable cost project. Does it seem reasonable to you? Yeah. Although I'm, it's like how much of this is trying to find guidance for, I guess, research offices that are dealing with the grants and how much of it is, I guess, focused on how costs, how different infrastructure could be built instead of spent externally? Oh, great question. So for the work that we're doing right now, it's really about the current landscape. So what exists out there right now? What are the costs involved? What are the prices involved? What are people actually being told to do by their institutions or their societies or their publishers or whatever, trying to get a handle on that so that we can understand what we're

working with right now so that then hopefully the next step will be identifying maybe some points where something is really needed, something's missing, something could be put together better and going from there and building out. But right now it's really just about like, what is the situation, what are folks doing, what is the response looking like and trying to get some ideas, see if we can see some patterns and places to collaborate. Okay. Is that the landscape analysis that's coming out soon? So we've just released the first landscape view of the research data public availability part of our study.

So we just did that in February. You'll see another one about article publications later this year. And then we'll have another one that is the outcome of the discussions with institutions and different organizations about their workflows and how they are guiding people and what that looks like. Okay. Yeah, I was, I knew there was something coming out and that it was going to come out after we did the episode. So I wasn't sure, like, which, if there was like a separate

landscape analysis altogether that I was missing. Yes, you're hinting at our state of open infrastructure report, which is a separate project that's coming out in a month or so after this, this episode. Okay. Well, we'll get to that in a second, I guess. Yeah, there was a report that came out the Australian Institute, which I thought was, might be relevant because it's, it's more looking at what are the costs in terms of educational spending, how much are they spending on subscriptions, one-time access, and article processing charges, and how much of that is grant money. And then so they come to some recommendations to change how their funding is done. So they want to incentivize publishing and cheaper open access journals, which I don't

Okay. I don't know how much pressure that's really going to put on anyone, because everyone still wants to publish in nature. And it's not cheap to publish in nature. That's for sure. Right. Trialing a lottery-based system for the allocation of grants, which is to make it more equitable so that it's not a hyper-publishing thing. Some of these I agree with, which is, you know, kind of doing anything to pull away from the publish grant, publish grant. And then, you know, you get issues like hyper-publishing and, you know, quicker turnaround times. I just did a whole presentation about this at my university for the School of Medicine where all of these knock on issues that come about because the incentives are focused on how much do you publish, how good of a journal is it? And then that creates quality issues for the journal because then the journal needs to get their turnaround time better. There are enough peer reviewers.

It causes all kinds of problems. So pulling off the gas on that in any way, I think is a good idea for funding bodies to do just so science has time to happen. is big part of it. So you're not salami slicing all your research into a dozen papers or generating it with AI and publishing that? Absolutely. It reminds me of the statement that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation also released, where they have a new open access policy or new variation of it, that basically they're stopping their support for article processing charges. And encouraging, I think it's encouraging or maybe mandating the use of preprints and preprint review. processes. So I think there's this kind of interesting, this Australia example that you have, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. It looks like there's an interesting push going on here from, from different funders. Yeah, I think it was really after Plan S didn't do what it was. It realized

throwing money at a problem wouldn't really fix it. Now they're trying to do something a little more nuanced rather than just pumping in a huge amount of money, maybe less amount of money and then more conditions on the money, stuff like that. A little bit more guidance. and less just being willing to pay anything with the means justifying the end, I suppose. Yeah, all right. Lost my notes because I opened up like 20 tabs. The bane of our existence. I'm just trying not to close the recording, because if I close it, there's a good chance.

We all die. Oh, no. We all cease to exist. We only live in this digital space. That's right. Yeah. Jay, did you have anything about that first project? Not particularly scholarly communications. I'm a copyright nerd, but other than that, it gets into the weeds of like some of the more intricacies. And I'm like, I peer reviewed one time. And I was like, sure, I think I did this right. And I haven't published anything since 2017.

Yeah. And as a, like, I've escaped. As a complete non-academic, the word infrastructure, I think has a very different connotation to me. I'm thinking like networks and. Same. Yeah. And thinking like ILS is. Yeah, like, well, and even beyond like systems, but like, you know, physical infrastructure that supports digital stuff. So for a complete layman's term sort of way, how are you guys defining infrastructure within like your own workspace, like work group? Yeah. We view open infrastructure as a spectrum and rather than thinking of it as like a binary kind of thing. And we're currently, you know, our current working definition for open infrastructure is services that meet one of several criteria.

They either meet the definition of open source software. They're primarily or exclusively distribute, they primarily are exclusively distribute openly licensed or open access content. It's free to use by anyone or, you know, either free of charge or other restrictions. It's community governed and it's transparent in its operations and finances and it's operated by a nonprofit or non-commercial entity. And again, for IOUI, we're primarily looking at the scholarly academic and scholarly research space. So it has to also be, so we tend to think of open infrastructure as a something digital, right? Less of the like hardware, you know, the physical world. Although those are certainly important components that make all of this stuff possible. But in order for us to possibly have a scope that we can work with, we tend to think of the digital infrastructure.

And yeah, to scope it in, it's those academic ecosystems to do research, to perform a function related to research. And this is everything from, you know, publish the platform that article is published on to like the plumbing infrastructure that like delivers you the metrics of like, downloads and views and like all of these things to, you know, data analysis, software, you know, all kinds of things fit into this, this big tent of infrastructure that we think about. Yeah, like as, so I'm a library director by which I mean I'm the only librarian. Like I'm not some highfalutin like super admin. I'm just the only librarian.

I'm at a very small institution. And I've been running into this because it's like I don't have a huge budget. But there are things that I want. want slash need, especially as like my university or my college, like wants more digital stuff, but they aren't giving me the money to do it. But RRRT is one guy and doesn't like to use open source stuff because he can't necessarily maintain and support it on his own because it doesn't come with tech support. And so I've been in this like tug of war being like, I can get archive space operating on my laptop right now. Just put it on a server and I'll do it. Like, you know, or like do I just buy hosting for it?

Like, because if I go through lyricists or some shit, like it's a million dollars, but do reclaim hosting, I could lie and get a single one and then and say it's not for an institution and then put it on there against the wills of my IT guy. Like, you know, like, it's this sort of like, okay, I can use all the open source, open infrastructure I want. But then if like hosting or like if my IT just says no, then I don't understand what I'm supposed to do, you know. Yeah, that comes up.

A lot. And that is something that we hear over and over again as we were doing these various projects. So actually, it's going to be a piece of the state of open infrastructure report that's going to come out in a little while. So we have a whole section on procurement and IT governance, which I just recently got the chance to, like, review and read a preview of. And it is a whole mess. It's not just you.

And it's not just this particular permutation of this problem. Like everywhere we hear about procurement processes being kind of not favorable to open infrastructure, even at organizations that say that they support open infrastructure and have a goal and stated mission to do open science and all of these things. They still like have trouble with their procurement processes. Whereas all these vendors, EPSCO only uses open source infrastructure, only. Everything that EPSCO has is open source. Folio is open source. and you could just go fucking get folio, but no one wants to. And so then we pay by water or LiraSS or EBSCO a million dollars for all of stuff that is open source.

So it's like when we say, oh, we don't procure open source, we actually are. We're just paying other people to do it for us. Yeah. And we could just do it. Yeah, exactly. And that's another interesting strategy that's come up in this space too is where like open, infrastructure, open software, open source services will actually either. spin up their own vendors so that there is an entity for these procurement folks to talk to

and to like put responsibility on. Or they will be like cultivating like a community of vendors who are, you know, they're participating in the community or they're giving back code or, you know, whatever it is in order to direct people to these like kind of trusted third parties that can like kind of help them get over that, that bias in the procurement process where they like kind of need this like vendor money exchanging hands for goods and services thing in order to understand what it means to have a software service. So this is a whole cool part of this upcoming report that I've just given you a little preview of so you can keep your eyes out for that. I cannot wait because I just want to be like, read it. Jay, may I ask a naive question as a person who doesn't, you know,

who's coming from outside this space? No naive. No session is about question. I also do instruction. Thank you. Yeah, so you mentioned earlier that there are open, open tool or open source tools like EBSCO and folio. But you can't, you can't get access to them. How come? So there's a lot of library software that is free and open source, including our integrated library systems like folio, co-ha, some of the discovery systems like Blacklight, the archive software like archive space. There's an alternative to lib guides called Subjects Plus. There's a lot of this stuff that is technically open source. And you can still get it for free, but because it can be sometimes complicated or Omeca, for example, is a great example of something that's free and open source. You just do it. Justin, shut up. It took like three months for us to get Omeca running. Oh. It should take three minutes. Yeah, if you do reclaim hosting on a, like, on a, what is it?

There's, Reclamation has this one like install an Nader thing for C panel where you just go, I want Omeca S. Thank you very much. And then you get it. And then you don't have to fuck around with it. Yeah, but yeah, so all of this stuff, it often requires, it can be kind of six different things in a trench. code. So it's like archive space, for example, required me to get my SQL on my laptop as well as solar on my laptop. And I knew I had to have the knowledge to know how to use a command line and VS code and like knew what all of that meant and how to follow instructions to get that to work.

Most of the stuff requires being on a server somewhere. It's not just on like, yeah, I got open or fine. I got Mark at it. Like I got all of these on my computer. I didn't have to talk to my IT guy about that. Zotero, great, love it. But then all of these other. more like library digital infrastructure things that are free, but require some being like are kind of complex or like and or need to be put on a server somewhere. And a lot of libraries don't want to do that. And also like if you do it yourself, you don't get tech support. And you have to like go and do like GitHub issues and like read those and care about those. Right. Whereas if you pay by water for Koha, they provide the tech support and hosting for you.

you know, that kind of thing. So that's sort of where these are free and but it's whether or not your library or IT is willing to put something on a server for you or pay for cloud like hosting for, you know, an external cloud server or something, which is still a physical server, just someone else has it, right? You know? Yeah. And did that answer your question? Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Thank you so much. It's interesting. Oh, sorry, Sadie, Sadie, go ahead. Oh, yeah, I was just going to say, is coming from an IT person, like, even IT has is pivoting a lot to cloud services and moving away from hosting our own servers. So like you mentioned Bywater, like one of my previous libraries purchased the discovery layer that Bywater sells. No, I forget what it was called.

It was a couple of years ago. But they're, they, they had an on-prem option, but it was they basically, it was like, their third tier option. So a lot of these vendors are also like cloud hosting or that sort of thing. So it's even getting harder and harder for IT to host our own stuff. And that just sort of trickles down to like Jay's situation. You can't even host easy proxy anymore. Like if you used to host easy proxy yourself, you still can. But you can't like that's on an option anymore when you get easy proxy. Yep. Only OCLC. Yeah. They hate that we're still self-hosting it. Yeah. Yeah. I don't want to support it.

Yeah, there's a, I imagine you guys probably run into this, have been running into this a lot. The supply chain complexity is probably just off the charts, just trying to navigate that as an IT department is kind of insane and not what I was like expecting to have to deal with in a lot of, a lot of ways. So, yeah. Yeah, what you're talking about, we heard about so much. for me coming into IOWI to figure out how to, you know, figure out how to create, like, make it easier to evaluate and adopt open infrastructure. You know, I was, I was hearing a lot of these, like, incredibly, like, excruciating and painful stories. And we started talking with providers and, you know, over the course of development of InfraFinder, and we were talking both, like, with the librarian and research folks and also with providers and just being like, okay, here's, here's a bunch of of complexity on the adoption side and how do we talk with providers to get them, you know, get them thinking about and able to give us data about, you know, things like what you're talking about. Is this thing free? What does free mean? Is it hosted? What does hosted mean? Do you have,

solutions vendors, you know, how does that work? And how can we then turn it into structured data to, to, that would enable us to create a product that is going to help adoptors and, you know, potentially funders as well, understand, like, what's out there, you know, are there intersections, you know, some kind of intersections between, you know, different tools and services in this space, you know, and that fundamental, like, local question of, you know, if you're at an institution, what you, one of the themes we heard is like, does the thing that I'm looking to get plug into my existing situation easily, right? You know, and like trying to figure out how to ask that question and get data in a way that made it really easy for people to then, you know, like, figure that out.

It turned up really hard. We're still working on refining how we do that. So, yeah, this conversation we're having right now, I'm just like, oh, like validation, but also, oh, my gosh. And you can tell what I was working on at work today. I'm like, oh, it's a good setup. Yeah, I pulled the same trick Jay's doing with, with archive spaces. I did do the same thing. And I, I instead. And I, installed a mecca on my computer and I said, look, it's not that hard. But yeah, it did take us like three months to get it set up because IT had to figure out, well, who owns this project now? And they have like three or five departments within IT and no one wants to do it. So then they had to wrangle them all into the same room. And then I had to watch them bounce the responsibility off

of each other for three months because I had to go to these meetings. So I did see some very impressive project management though. So I really respect a skilled project manager now because the way they like pulled teeth from everyone in the room when they had to was very impressive to me. And I was like, maybe I should do project management training. And then I looked into how much experience you need to have. And I was like, oh, never mind. It costs a million dollars to do those certifications. You have to take like tests and everything. That's how you get certified. Then you have to like project manage. Like, ugh. You don't have to do anything. You don't have to do of the work. You just have to tell other people what to do.

I think it's pretty cool. It scratches the part of my brain that puts everything in its place. Yeah. I mean, having come from product development, an amazing project manager, a really, really strong project manager can be the difference between just suffering a lot and getting things done. So I definitely plus one on awesome project managers. Okay. Let's go on to InfraFinder because I believe I was a beta tester for this. So let us know about InfraFinder. Sure. Yeah.

Well, I guess, you know, in a nutshell, what we're trying to do is create a tool that makes it easier to evaluate and adopt open infrastructure. You know, when it comes time to choose something, what we were really looking for is to enable people to know what kind of options we're out there. Like, you know, people are going to choose the tool that's going to, you know, solve their immediate problems. But one of the things that we were hearing is that not everybody kind of is aware of what's available and that there are open options available. And so what we're doing with InfraFinders essentially like creating a first step foray into developing something that's, you know, attractive and easy to use that helps the process of discovery and evaluation. So, yeah, Lee wanted to, you know, in coming up with the developer or the idea for it, infrefinder. We had a whole sort of, you know, I went through a whole sort of, what would you call it, like discovery and, you know, discovery process, doing a lot of interviews and a lot of

reading. And then eventually, you know, some initial design test, you know, your user focused, sorry, user research focus groups and then doing design testing as well. And, you know, Justin, I want to thank you for being a part of that. Well, I always love to jump in when I, when I smell an opportunity to influence the way a project is going or get a discount when it comes out. So there's always good reasons to take the time. Yeah. I mean, one of the things from, you know, my experience doing, you know, product development is like, you know, internally, you might have really, really good ideas, but you don't actually know what's going to be useful to people until you talk to the people who are your end users. And Lauren worked with me on this

project along with other colleagues at IOI. Lauren being, you know, be herself being a librarian, and really knowing the sort of what we call the provider space, like people who make the, open infrastructure. You know, her input was really, you know, her input and the care that she took and talking with the providers was really, really important. For me, you know, thinking about the end user on the adopter side, you know, talking with folks like you, Jason also helped me to kind of understand, you know, some of the questions, like getting answers to some of the questions that I had, you know, like in addition, I did a lot of deep dive into prior work because, you know, InfraFinder, what we're doing, others have also tried before. And so, you know, I wanted to draw

inspiration from other projects like SCOMCAT and the 400 Innovations and Scholarly Communication list. You know, PubPubs got a Mind the Gap list of tools. And even I.O.I had initially done a prototype before I came on board that was called the Catalog of Open Infrastructure Services. But for me, the thing that I was really thinking a lot about is like, how can we make some, you know, how can we make something that's really useful for people? And, you know, one of the things that I was hearing is, you know, when it comes time to do, like, you know, figure out what's out there and do vendor evaluation, like, just pulling together all the information was really time consuming. You know, like stuff was just everywhere, right? It's really hard to kind of gather, gather that information.

It takes a lot of time. It's hard to kind of evaluate, like, different aspects of things and evaluate, you know, one solution versus enough. other. So that is, you know, we're trying to, in releasing InfraFinder, that's what we're trying to help you do. Just make it easier for you to find information and, you know, compare things so that, you know, whatever you choose, you know, you had, you know, you've done good due diligence. So I've seen the tool, but I don't know if many other people have. What distinguishes InfraFinder from like a catalog? Like, what's the functionality of the tool that you're trying to bring out of it? Yeah. Well, I think the the key things that we offer. Right now, what we're going to have is 57 different providers

of open infrastructure within this tool that allow you to get information, but also compare things side by side. And I think that comparison can be really useful for people. This is one of the things that we were hearing. Another piece is that a lot of these open infrastructures don't really have like marketing budgets at all. And they don't really have an opportunity to kind of present, you know, in a sort of succinct way, like what makes them, you know, what are they, what are they looking to do for folks and what makes them shine? You know, we're trying, we, we asked a lot of questions about the technology itself. If you were, Jay, you were mentioning before, it's like, you had to have solar installed and you had to, you know, like have a whole bunch of like preexisting tooling to, you know,

or download a bunch of preexisting tooling in order to get the thing up and running. We did ask questions about that, you know, that we got information. about a lot of the libraries and research institutions we talk to as well, they're like, we're kind of less concerned about that piece in the initial evaluation. And we're really looking for us to drive forward like their own, what's the right word, like their own like initiative, like organization wide initiative to move toward open. And so they're thinking about things like policies, you know, transparency, governance. And so we also pulled that information together as well. And so So all of, you know, everything from the story of like, what is this tool? What are some of the key achievements of the organization that hosts or built this tool? What are some of the technical aspects that, you know, are like some of the technical aspects about this tool that you need to know. When it comes to participatory, you know, like being in that open space of community participation, what does that look like? Is it, you know, is that a thing that is applicable, if it's out.

applicable, what does that look like? When we're talking about governance, what is the governance model? Can you tell us a little bit more about that? And then have an opportunity to also understand a little bit about like how many full-time staff do they have on the project. What's the history of the organization itself? What are their funding needs? It's all kind of in one place. And we think that that having spoken with both providers as well as adopters, we feel like this is a good first step in helping to make it easier to understand. what the choices are that are out there and how well they meet your needs. Yeah, I believe I might have brought this up while we were talking even, but one thing is always like, I was going to bring this up earlier, which was, you know, I was able to get Omeca through our IT, but, you know, when I started my job during my like presentation, I was like, you know, I would, my ideal would be to run the repository locally on like Haiku or Samvera. And that has many more components. It has much more processing power than a little exhibit software.

You know, it needs serious storage. It needs serious resources to actually run, which is going to drive up, like, actual operating costs of the university. Did you hear that anywhere else in terms of like the problems of the size of the software? Rather than the size specifically, a big theme that came up was like, you know, in total, right? When we look at the like holistically in total, what is this going to cost us? Everything from, you know, just getting like the doing the installation to keeping the thing maintained to, you know, getting upgrades or features, new features added.

That was definitely like, you know, that theme around the costs was definitely a thing that came through really strongly. And what we discovered is that there's not, because everything is so highly variable and nuanced, there wasn't really an easy way for us to be like, hey, here's a cost calculator. Bang, right? Like, you know, not at this stage. So the best that we could do is essentially say, you know, if you are the cost transparent and then, you know, point people to here's where you would find that information. Yeah. So, so, you know, this, what we're trying to do in InfraFinders is kind of like make it easier to be like, okay, I have a set of questions. How much can I quickly understand? And if I need to have that one on one, one conversation. conversation, you know, we provide a way for you to easily go and, you know, get in touch with folks. Okay. With universities focusing on their open commitments, have you seen like what's guiding a lot of that, like what their motivations are that trickle through in your discussions?

Yeah. In fact, Lauren, did, you know, as a, as a librarian with experience of this, did you want to share what you've, what you've seen in the space? Yeah, absolutely. So some of the things that we heard specifically related to this project. You know, there's a lot of discourse out there in the world, whether it, you know, in the U.S., the policies coming down from funders, if it's like the UNESCO Open Science Declaration, if it's, you know, a scholarly society with declaration, if it's, you know, signing pledges like Dora or all these different things, there's a lot of sort of external pressures going on. But what I think really coalesced for me as a theme, when I was talking to folks in the space was that the more of your peer institutions that are doing it, the more pressure you feel to do it.

So by, you know, we see this with organizations like Helios open, right? You know, there's a lot of like, this is an organization where a lot of like presidents and provosts and like really higher up administrators and higher ed are joining. And it's, you know, it's about making an institutional commitment to open research in a variety. variety of ways. And once you start seeing that, like, oh, our peer institutions president is in this group and making these commitments, what are we doing in this space? There's this really like coalescing factor around just seeing others doing this and then wondering how you can, whether how you can keep up, how you can do something new or what ideas you can collaborate on or barrel. That's an interesting thing that I saw when I was talking to some of the service providers for InfraFinder too. kind of related theme, which, so I did a lot of interviews with our 57 service providers, whether that was, you know, through Zoom or, you know, at conferences or via email. And I heard an awful lot of folks saying, well, these, the Posey principles came out. The principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure came out. And these other organizations that I follow started doing self-assessments. So we decided to do one too.

And so when there are these sort of like guiding, whether they're principles or documents, and then people are starting or other organizations that you admire are starting to get on board, they can serve as good models. And it's also a source of inspiration. That's one of the things I wanted to interject on Chris when she was talking about InfraFinder is that we saw from the service providers that they wanted to go in to InfraFinder. And like when they had a question, like one of them was telling me, it's really time for us to update our code of conduct. If we have an old one, it's, you know, okay, but, you know, we wanted to update it.

And they were really excited to be able to go in and look at what others have and say, oh, that, that one is a good model. This one has a really good, you know, framework that we can borrow. And so, like, that's a source of inspiration too. And so we're kind of hoping that InfraFinder will be that sort of source for inspiration as well, whether that's to choose an open infrastructure or to build a policy or to think about, okay, what can we move towards in the space? So, yeah, there's this sort of like coalescing like group movement that once you get enough folk doing something, then you can see other folks start to move on.

So that's one of the really big things that I heard. Yeah. And to build on that when I was talking with librarians and other adopters, you know, some, there were several of them whose leadership and within the institution were really keen on, you know, thinking of. you know, like as institutions of learning and scholarship, that it was, it was almost like, to me, it was almost like, this is the right thing to do, right? Like openness is the right thing to do. Open access is the right thing to do. You know, one thing that just comes to mind right now is the University of California system published, I think it was, I want to see it was in 2015, the UC presidential like open access policy. And this is something that kind of reaches across the

entire University of California system, which is, I believe, is like one of the largest research university systems in in the country, if not the world. And so, you know, they are like, it's this idea of like, as a public institution, scholarship, you know, disseminating research and scholarship, as widely as possible is, is the right thing to do to promote, to promote knowledge and serve the, you know, the people, you know, the people of the state. And, they have a rubric actually that they developed that, you know, I'd heard a number of folks that we did focus groups with say, even if they were at institutions that, you know, were smaller and not as well funded, that they were taking, you know, they were taking inspiration from that, you know, like what

qualifies as open for them, taking that rubric and, you know, drawing inspiration for it. When at their own institutions where their leadership was also thinking about like, you know, open is the right. thing to do. How do we think about what we need in order to make open possible where we are and create our own definition. Yeah. It is nice that's an effect, but it's very frustrating when you're the one who wants to be first, which is what I always want to do. It's I was like, no one's done this yet. We could, we could, we could, it's so easy. We could, we could be the first one in like, Texas to do it or, and it's usually something so simple. And everyone's like, oh. There's that, that fear of being the like first adopter and like doing something wrong or get.

getting burned or, you know, anything like this. Yeah, that's, that, that comes up a lot. It is frustrating. I was in a similar kind of position in my previous work where there were a lot of things that just seemed really possible, but we needed that like sort of extra push to get there. This is one space where I think organizations like library consortia can really have a huge effect because, you know, I'm thinking about like, for example, we talked to the folks at Palsy and Pauley, the Pennsylvania library consortium and the library consortium of Indiana. Those acronyms have more letters in them that I can't remember the meanings for. So these folks work together to as a consortia, as two consortia, adopt Haiku, right, and bring it to their members. They're by giving like their members easier access

to it. And just the kind of multiplying effect of that, like the consortium did it. And so that alone sort of has this effect of saying, okay, well, if I'm at a small institution within this consortium, I can just be like, look, my consortia decided this is, my consortium decided that this is a good idea. They're providing access. And all of these other institutions in my consortium are also, you know, involved in this. So it's kind of this multiplying effect. And I think research networks throughout the world, whether they're library consortia or scholarly societies or the other, like, regional networks, they could really have a multiplying effect and help, help this along as well in order to help, you know, folks get going on these projects when there might be that, like,

kind of first adopter. Of course, they have to also get over the first adopter reticence. Yeah. Yeah, I always wonder whether there's not more things like, like Texas Digital Library to do other services like publishing, we could centralize into an organization that, you know, the universities in your system do business with. Why is, why not that, you know? It's interesting. But for IT infrastructure, definitely, I mean, all of this is kind of an infrastructure issue and a labor issue. So again, I really don't see a difference between having it to host Haiku or to have it host press books and hire some copy editors and some subject editors or something like that. So anyway, to close out, why don't we talk about the upcoming landscape analysis? So what's going to be in that?

We've already talked about the procurement a little bit. Yeah. That's the State of Open Infrastructure Report that IOUI is working on. That should come out in late May, I believe, so not too long from now. It's getting closer every day. So the person at IOUI that's really leading this work is Gail Steinhart. Chris and I both worked on little pieces of this project, but I just want to give credit where credit is due here.

But in this report is a landscape analysis. And you're talking about the procurement. There's also going to be some discussion of policies worldwide. that are developing and how they're having an impact specifically on infrastructure development. And another big part is actually research that we are doing based on the data in InfraFinder. So one of the cool things about InfraFinder is we're making the data openly available too. So you can get access to it and do research and explore that as well. And we did that for this report where we looked at characteristics of the infrastructures and

softwheres that are in. Inferfinder, we kind of looked at their age, how long they've been around, kind of where they're located geographically, as well as looking at some of the commonly mentioned funding needs, things that they got grants to do. And basically everything that we could, you know, make a chart out of in our InfraFinder data, we did it. So this is, you know, just kind of trying to do a landscape analysis on the state of open infrastructure. broadly and some of the trends and big ideas that we're seeing. So of course, there's the procurement in there, which is a big trend. There's also the sort of maturing of software and infrastructure where we're seeing like changes in business models and changes in governance and like, you know, expanding into

different membership and all these kinds of things in there as well. And we're also, yeah, the policy part is also really interesting. We're trying to look at policy developments in various parts of the world, see if there are common themes, see how they specifically impact infrastructure. There's a lot of folks doing policy analysis, especially in the EU. We don't need to do our own, but we're really interested in how these either mention infrastructure or in some cases don't mention infrastructure at all, but merely implicate that, oh, we need infrastructure to do this work. Where will it come from? Who will pay for it on this kind of policy? So this report is a behemist. It's a very large report. And it There will be several different pieces in there that are all worked together.

And we're really excited to have it come out. And I'm really excited, especially about the infrefinder data use. Yeah, that's great. Now, I love a good landscape analysis. I've still been using the one from Spark to onboard my graduate assistants. I just hand it to them and say, read this. You'll get an idea of what we're doing here because I kind of, you know, they're going to have a job doing, mostly processing. But I also want to give them an idea of if they have any projects they're interested in doing, you know, their students first.

So I want them to like try stuff if they find it to work interesting. But that only happens once in a while. Most graduate assistants just kind of want to get assigned whatever they're going to do and do it. But I always keep the option open. Like, what if you wanted to build something cool? I don't know. What if you wanted to make an exhibit? Go for it.

So maybe I'll send them the state of open infrastructure report to and see if anyone gets any ideas. Yeah, if you do, let us know. They'd love to hear from them. And this is one of the other parts of this report that we're still working on is sort of a, like a future view, like what we're going to be paying attention to in the next, you know, year or so in this space and developments that we think are going to, you know, be very interesting. One of the ones that I've been working on is talking about diamond open access and all the discourse around, you know, no APC, no subscription, this, this totally free open, I just

did air quotes and podcast listeners can't hear air quotes. This totally free of payment by author or readers version of publishing that has been dubbed Diamond Open Access at some point. But there's been a lot of summits, a lot of talk, a lot of discussion of how we need to support it and business models being talked about, developments. And I am really personally interested to see where that goes in the next year where all this talk will go into action and what that will mean for the infrastructures that support these kind of publishing models too. So that's one of the kind of future looking parts of the report too. Yeah. So we're still working on that part, but we'll see if we get it right. Yeah. Well, I mean,

the money to support the publishing infrastructure is obviously already there because the money does support publishing infrastructure. The question is like governance, control, proliferation, profit padding, all sorts of reasons that things could be different. So and yeah, and there's also these tipping points. So once enough people try something new, you know, we see journals flip a lot. you know, editorial boards resign, go start a diamond open access journal somewhere. Yeah, trends can change. Sometimes fast. Sometimes.

Yeah. Yes, absolutely. So if you have any, any things that you think we should pay attention to in the next year for trends for the state of open infrastructure, let us know. Send us a note. We happy to hear from you. Yeah. I want to also say that, you know, this is true of a lot of Iowa's work.

We're very, we look to be very, very collaborative in all of the things. that we do, you know, talking with the community, you know, really, you know, like asking questions and listening to people and then responding in kind. You know, InfraFinder was like that as well. And one of the things that I, you know, forgot to mention is that, you know, one of what we aim to do with InfraFinder is ensure that it's living and growing tool. So, you know, we're starting with 57 infrastructures, but, and we're working with providers to make sure that they are constantly updating the data when there are new updates because that's, you know, that's something we've seen that we've heard from end users of like, you know, is this thing? Like, how do we know this, this thing has the most

current information? And we're going to be working to make sure that that happens. But in addition, you know, inviting providers to, to also like that aren't ready in the tool to also, you know, come and, you know, give us data so that they can be, they can be. So again, you know, we're, we are also looking to hear from, you know, end users as well, librarians like, you know, people that are listening to, you know, give us feedback on like, how can we make this more useful for you? Because that is, you know, like any endeavor that we do, whether it's, you know, the landscape analysis, further research, you know, product building. We, we want to hear from people to make sure that we're creating something that, you know, like produces high value and utility for folks.

We also want to hear if folks listening do use InfraFinder for something, even if it's not the intended purpose that we stated here to discover an open infrastructure, if you use it for something else, we want to know about it because we find, well, first of all, we want to know that people are using the tool. But we also want to know, you know, is there another possible use case? Is there another audience that finds this information valuable? And can we work with them to see how we can improve for that? as well. So if anybody listening or folks, other hosts on this podcast, do wind up using it for something? Just let us know. We'd love to hear about it. Great. Okay. I think we're good to wrap up. Thank you both so much for coming on. Yeah. Thank you, Justin and Jay and Sadie. This is very cool. Yeah. Yeah. And there's, we've got a lot of links that'll go in the notes. So be sure to go through it. And we'll promote the report on the state of open infrastructure when that comes out. So we'll, we'll post that as a follow-up. That would be awesome. We're really excited about that one, too. Thank you again. And good night.