This episode is audio from METRO's Digital Culture of Metropolitan New York community event, featuring a presentation by Kaitlin Thaney, Executive Director, Invest in Open Infrastructure. It was recorded on April 8, 2026.
Announcer 0:01
Welcome to Engelberg Center Live!, a collection of audio from events held by the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy at NYU Law. This episode is audio from METRO's Digital Culture of Metropolitan New York community event featuring a presentation from Kaitlin Thaney, Executive Director Invest in Open Infrastructure. It was recorded on April 8, 2026
Kaitlin Thaney 0:28
Hi everybody. My name is Caitlin. It's lovely to be here with you all in New York. I'm going to give a little bit of a different story in here because of the work that we do at invest in open infrastructure, which I'll tell you a little bit about, but given the topic of the changing seasons, also talking about some of the shifting sand. So I hope it's okay, Alice, I'm going to be a little spicy with where we are with this little spicy let's see. Oh, and I use a clicker. Yes, no clicker here. Click on the presentation. Awesome, perfect. Okay, so for those of you who are less aware of what invest in open infrastructure, IOI, for short, it's a mouthful. My background in the space, for those that have this the first time meeting me, I've worked in a number of big, open organizations, building out programs in sustainability for the last, gosh, over 20 years. We'll pretend that that was like a shorter period of time, but from Creative Commons to Mozilla to Wikimedia to others. So have admired much of the work that's here represented in the room, the work that we do at IOI. IOI was started by a coalition of individuals like yourselves across many different disciplines, from open access, open science archives, preservation institutions, funders that were really frustrated with the fact that the open infrastructure that these systems and knowledge sharing systems rely on were being undercut by what seemed like challenges to funding and things that would allow for their broader adoption. So a lot of the work that Diego has been doing, and many of you here, and so what we do as an organization, we're a not for profit initiative. We work to catalyze investment and adoption of these open digital infrastructure tools to help facilitate broader access to knowledge and to research. High level bit here, and I can make these slides available. We do this in a number of ways. We're a small team. We try to help support the infrastructures themselves and means of helping to build out sustainable business models, helping them understand how they can help further their own adoption, because we know that for open infrastructure, that the actual adoption of those tools, in many cases, is the biggest indicator of whether or not that will be cared for and maintained. This also goes into governance design. Many of us really deeply care about that in terms of open values and principles. In some cases, it's also looking at where there are shared structure opportunities, where groups that can better represent their communities and be embedded in that can focus on that work, and we can take maybe some of the business side off and look at more efficient models and be creative about that. We also do a lot of work brokering with funders to get more money into the space and see where we can allocate that to critical needs. And then we sit individually outside of a funder, an institution, an organizational sort of home, so that we can help assess where there are trends, where there are things that we can see, not only in terms of where funding is flowing. But what is actually stopping that? In some cases, yes, more money would always be great. In other cases, it is not always. What is the only factor that contributes to whether or not a tool is successful or that infrastructure is able to be depended on in the way in which it's initially intended?
Kaitlin Thaney 4:01
So bit here, and I'll go into a specific project that we wrapped up last summer, but I'll give you a little bit of a fly by for what IOI does, and I encourage you to look at our website, which is invest in open so when we talk about open infrastructure, we're talking all about the tools that you all have been working on and others that are helping in terms of the research workflow. So open access, publication platforms, archives, preservation I heard archive space man mentioned archipelago, things around scientific data, computing, libraries, frameworks, etc, all of that underlying the underlying systems. And then we also look at the open side of that, so that narrower source slice of open source solutions, systems and supports that help facilitate, again, that creation and dissemination of research content and data. And we've seen many of these things flourish, and you could even argue we may have too many options, right? Many of these two. Tools and services were created, as we've heard from some of our other speakers, from grant funding, and it becomes difficult to sustain them, but many, very much crafted to meet a specific community's needs. And so, you know, this is just a smattering of some of the catalogs. Ours is in the bottom left hand corner of some of these options. There's lots of options out today, and this is where we get to some of the spicy side. So we try to help serve as some of the problem solvers in the space, and also as big advocates of these tools and services. And I'm not going to go through all of these in the presentation, but we're at a time where I think we do need to name some of the assumptions we keep tripping over. So you know, these are things that we hear all the time. Having open infrastructure in our name, there's not enough money to fund open infrastructure, survival equals success. How many of us know a project that's operating on pennies? Innovation is the only way to stay relevant or get funded. It gets into the grant funding. Nonprofits are always good for profits are always bad. One is always values aligned. One is always not commercial. Clouds are great for hosting open tools. I think we're seeing where some of that's falling down. Now, community governance is always best again. There's lots of nuance, and I'm a huge fan of community governance. If one is good, five is better. That might be my favorite one here. Open means free, open solutions are riskier than proprietary ones. Anyone who's had to try to do the case making within your institution, especially when covid hit, of trying to make a rapid change, I think may have come across that one. And so what we do is we try to provide some hard facts. And this is difficult to do because not everything is trackable. We have a state of open infrastructure report. This was from 2025 our one for 2026 will be coming out this fall, and we use that as a means to help provide a free resource and open resource for others. To really dig into some of the analysis. Think of it as some of the deeper looks at where funding is flowing, where it's not what's changing in terms of these infrastructures, where we're seeing trends and bottlenecks and things that are coming up. How we can surface those and I won't go into too much of this detail here, but I encourage you to take a look. This year will be our third report, so there's one from 2024 2025 and there'll be this next report. In addition to that, we have a infrastructure discovery tool called infra finder. This was funded by the Mellon Foundation, and this is to help not only provide yet another catalog of open infrastructure tools, but really to get at some of the challenges that we heard from those that were looking for and doing due diligence on whether it was like a repository tool or digital asset management tool, something like archipelago, but they may realize, like, you know what? I want more technical customization. Maybe I want to go with this versus this. It allows for you to look across our catalog of tools. This is also these also created with the infrastructures themselves. And so they have an ability to update and continue to keep up to date the information that's there. It's deep engagement with those communities, and it's a mix of the practical information that you need to know, as well as some of the values alignment. The other thing I'll note, the reason this is under methods, all of the analysis that we do for the state of open infrastructure report is based on the infrastructures that we have in in for finder, we're always looking to grow that. So if there's one that I think archipelago Diego, I'm going to point at you. I don't know if archipelago is in it just yet. It is good. Okay? I know it was maybe one of the recent one. Was it one of the first? Okay? I knew we were in conversation about, I was hoping, I was hoping, I was hoping I didn't put anything up around archipelago. But also, to note that, like for and I'll talk a little bit about our grant funding data, but also you can find it in in for finder. We use this as the resource to then be able to build out more of our analysis. In for finder currently, as of today, has 139
Kaitlin Thaney 9:01
solutions in it. We're continually growing that. So giving you a take on this, these are some of the things that you can find in the state of open infrastructure report. There's also a live dashboard you can dig into ways of analyzing the infrastructures and also grant funding. Last year, we surveyed and qualified over $551 million of funding from philanthropies, from government sources, from non US, sources, information, any information we could find. And this gets into some difficult territory when it comes to then, and this is where the infrastructures and infrastructure finder become really helpful, to be able to try to pattern match, to see what's actually being funded. Because anyone who's worked with Grant data can tell you it's very complicated to be able to sift through that. Sometimes we don't have all the information. So for example, if there's a tool that might be embedded within the University of Illinois, the grant may say it's two. University of Illinois may be harder for us to get that information. So just know there's some caveats. You can find more information, but this is the sort of stuff that we do so that we can better direct our strategic support and advise infrastructures and help to further some of the adoption. I'll note here just in terms of some of the trends, because I know, out of all the speakers, we really bury our heads in some of this stuff. So one thing that's interesting to point out, if you look at the bottom left under adjacent, which is that yellow versus direct funding the adjacent is what we have found. So take, for example, Creative Commons licenses. I think everyone here is familiar with Creative Commons, the number of grants that reference something being Creative Commons licensed, but no funding going to Creative Commons to maintain those licenses. You could use that in terms of also looking at something that's put into Archipelago or archivesspace, but might not be funding to actually go to that infrastructure. Direct is when there's actual funding going to that infrastructure to help support its ongoing operations. And adjacent is when it's mentioned, but there might not be any sort of element there. We care a lot about the dependencies of like, this whole space could be built on sand, right, if
Kaitlin Thaney 11:11
we don't actually think about those underlying infrastructures. And then you can see on the other side here, you know, things that we can do around looking at what's research and development versus operations, and digging into different means of looking at that. In addition to that, this was looking at, you know, things that be relevant for this room. So repositories, digital asset management, archives, preservation tools. And you can go and you can play around with this on our website as well. You can see, you know, in terms of the sample that we have for total funding, high percentages of National Science Foundation funding, and IMLS Mellon comes in at that as well. And then it starts to trickle down total funding by category again, these I had shared on the previous screen, but you can start to look and see where there might be elements now I don't think I probably need to tell many people in this room that the last 18 months have been choppy in the funding ecosystem, you know, but this also allows for us to be able to look and see, okay, where do we need to find different funding to supplant and our team goes and we knock on the doors in terms of helping to increase some of That funder participation. So trying to see, can we get, for example, Getty trust on board. Can we get MasterCard Foundation to dedicate some resources? Can we bring these funders back to the table? Because we know that IMLS, NEH and NSF just got hobbled, right? And so this is what we are also doing behind the scenes. Based on some of this analysis and in deep conversation with the community, we also ran last year, when everything was real chaotic, a pulse poll to say, you know, how numerous and diverse are the infrastructures that respondents consider vital, and where are their dependencies, right? So, you know, you look at certain publication venues that build off of open data repositories. I'll give a big example, Bio Archive and med archive, now known as open archive, huge funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. Embedded in that is a data repository that had a third of its funding disappear last year just from the trickle down effects of the cuts from the federal government to institutions, and that was a third of its operating budget for one of the most successful folks at open archive, did not realize that, because it was expected that that infrastructure was just going to be part of a partnership ecosystem and not have there be any sort of financial transaction. And so this becomes, you know, a way in which we can maybe start poking a little bit and say, you know, actually, if you're going to shore up your dependencies. Here's where you need to look. So again, I want to be mindful of time, but I want to get to a project that we did that I think is really relevant for this group. I've given you sort of a overview of some of the things that IOI choose on terms of the shifting sands. Again, I won't spend too much time on these bullets, but some of the infrastructure needs that we've been hearing from the broader community, and also looking at this from a couple different angles, are challenges with current organizational structures, or business forms, operating models. We've heard of some of these, especially over the last 25 years, high costs, shifting costs, funding limitations, systemization across offerings can be a challenge. You know, discovery and awareness can are still lagging, especially this past, you know, I'd say 12 to 18 months, concerns with the ability to operate within the US safely. There been a lot of threats to nonprofits. There's been a lot of threats to funding. And also the quick answer of like, we're just going to go get European funding. It's a lot harder than it looks, because you need to be established in various ways. And so, you know, the redundancy, the funding concerns, the multiple layers there. We dig into that complexity, and we were trying to figure out ways in which we can help map some solutions. But there's a growing willingness and demand for shifting to new models, but that needs to. Trust, and it needs resourcing. It needs aligned funders or funding sources or organizations. And you know again, that funding architecture shake up. IMLS is gone. IMLS is back. NSF is gone. NSF is back. I was on an NSF review panel for the past two days, and from day one to day two, the requirements for how we reported changed overnight, and then we had to go back and redo all of our work on Monday like it is still in high, high states. And I want to be honest about that. I don't think that pretending like everything is is springing back is helpful. These are fundamentally different times. And so this was actually a project to be last thing I wrap up on. This was a project that we had actually put forward with for those in the academic library space, to consortia that worked very closely together on PALNI and pelsey. We had put together a an IMLS grant that had gotten pre approved and then hobbled right. And so we moved forward with this work on our own cost, and this was really to look at, and we kind of scoped it down to a sprint, but to say, you know, we know that there are a number of consortia, or networks Metro, we also include in this that this was looking at us library consortia, but that have taken significant steps to try to provide open infrastructure shift the way in which they operate, to help support some of these underlying tools and and plumbing. And so we interviewed 15 consortial leads to identify some patterns. All of our research materials are on our website and also on Zenodo, which is an open repository. And the main aim here was that when libraries, or you can say broader networks, face existential threats, archives as well, from federal funding cuts, vendor consolidation, capacity crises, etc, what can help provide stability? And so looking at this, you know, from the library consortia, you know, is really some of the critical stewards of this work, critic you know, and they're playing a real key role in stabilizing some of these library services that the crucial services include, not include those that provide and support sovereignty so your own autonomy and protect open infrastructure. And they sit between institutions and infrastructure in many ways. And also there's more tentacles out there between the archives, the collections, etc. And they can help coordinate investment at a different layer. It's a kind of a mediation layer, and many of those already host or support shared services, and so seeing where we could help surface some of that playbook. And so, you know, I know this was mentioned earlier. I think it was,
Kaitlin Thaney 17:34
rob you had a great, great quote about how, you know, it's not about, like, when you buy the apartment, there's upfront costs, but you're not your landlord, you know, is increasing rent. I think we also see this in terms of some of the membership, reliance on membership in the broader space of you know, we saw this with a project we did with archive AR X IV, higher energy physics, computational science archive, where the membership, the membership fees that they were having from institutions ranged, I think it was 5000 to $20,000 and a number of institutions provided support, but not all. We did an analysis based on the volume that their scholars were were producing that were hosted on archive. Average cost was $75,000 if we did, I think it was $25 per submission. Again, we are not an advocate of submission costs, but just to say, like, in terms of helping to support the underlying operations where there's discrepancies and so, you know, we again, going back to one of those other assumptions. I think, when we talk about open infrastructure is not being dependable, which I don't believe that we're better off paying for these proprietary safe bets. I think, you know, rob you put it beautifully. Of there may be those upfront costs, but it allows for you to have more of that flexibility over time. Okay, back to orbit. We named these strategic pathways that we saw as we went through these interviews. Courtney mama from the Texas Digital Library said, you know, I don't really see any other way forward than sharing infrastructure and sharing expertise and looking at these pathways. We looked at hosting, building, sponsoring, training and cultivating, continually coming up, I'm going to go through quickly hosting. And this is Kirsten Leonard, who leads PALNI. But the whole purpose of moving to open is flexibility in business and service models, you know, looking at where there are increased opportunities for collaboration terms of building those that know Orbis cascade. Isaac Gillman had said, you know, we're constantly watching for situations where our libraries feel boxed in, where there's only one option, institutions are forced to pay the piper, and those are the areas that we are looking to step in and see how much influence we can exert to create better alternatives. And so seeing where there are those high needs areas, formalizing collaboration, where there actually is a need to either build on existing infrastructure or build something new or build alternatives, sponsoring center for. Research Libraries. Jake Nadal said, you know, I think of us as a joint venture, a joint stock company, stock company to accomplish certain purposes, but where you can sponsor infrastructure, maybe provide that support within lyricists, which I used to be on the board of, does this for archivesspace, collection, space, the dura space merger, and so looking at financial support for critical third parties is another option. Training Morris York from big 10 academic alliance, but looking at, you know, what are some of each of our strengths, where we can, we look at raising the awareness and the adoption of open infrastructure and build communities of practice in terms of cultivation, this is Boston Library Consortium. Those of you that may know Charlie Barlow that the best thing we can do is respond to risks, to serve as a convener of ideas and thinking and set that table for coordination, which I very much see this event doing what Allison and Nate and the team do, so building trust and enabling collaboration and empowering consortia to build and maintain shared governance. I'm going quickly and a few examples of this. I won't go through all of it, but there's more than we think right where these these consortia and these research networks are looking at ways in which you've got everything here from Texas, data repository, Open Journal, systems comes up a number of times. Portico archives, Haiku, open press, books, Omeka Miru, which was actually built to tie together Open Journal systems, Janeway and D space, with a number of other elements, looking at archival, finding a database and building on open source code bases, re share open Rs, Metro building and running archipelago as great examples of this, and seeing where we could start to surface this more that there's a lot of spaces, isn't starting from scratch. And so
Kaitlin Thaney 21:49
again, revisiting some of these assumptions, I think you know you can combat some of that when you look at where there's already collaboration taking place, where places like this can help facilitate that shared learning, and groups like Metro and the organizations you're all working with can help provide that support and that continuity in uncertain times. And you know, again, just in terms of recommendations, also looking at where duplication and overcrowding might be a problem, where we can maybe look at ways of building bridges across and reinforce and build on those strengths, incentivizing that collective action and learning through cohorts and really thoughtful partnerships and looking at dedicated funding to looking at those shared structures, even if it is, I know that might seem as dirty words, but mergers and consolidations where there's places that we can do more together, work smarter, not harder, and really treat this moment like the Emergency that it is, and think of some of those creative, creative models that we can use to help weather the uncertain times that are inevitable to continue. Thank you so much.
Announcer 22:55
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