Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) has been awarded a $150,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to conduct a study on the research software ecosystem. The study will focus on identifying current needs, dependencies, and future opportunities to improve the sustainability and resilience of research software infrastructure.

IOI will conduct a landscape analysis and needs assessment to understand the current state and potential of research software infrastructure. This will focus on identifying:

• Existing connections between different infrastructure services and initiatives, and where new connections can be built to advance sustainability and resilience of the ecosystem;
• Areas in the ecosystem where there is overcrowding/excessive functional overlap, and where there are gaps, blockers, vulnerabilities, and/or critical dependencies that need addressing;
• Indications of what helps infrastructure services and initiatives succeed in adding value to the research software community.

IOI will use a combination of desk research, stakeholder interviews, and analysis, to understand what is most needed and useful. This study will expand on previous work and focus on highlighting and examining research software tools and services developed and supported by underrepresented communities, including women, Black, Indigenous, Latina/o/e communities, as well as scholars and developers in non-English speaking contexts and in lower and middle-income economies (LMIE).

This research will be conducted over a five-month period and is expected to be finalized by the first quarter of 2025. The findings will be shared through open-access briefs and reports. To stay updated, please remember to subscribe to the IOI newsletter.