Infra Finder: A new tool to enhance transparency, discoverability, and trust in open infrastructure

This paper describes Infra Finder, a new tool built by Invest in Open Infrastructure to help
institutional budget holders and libraries make more informed decisions around adoption of and
investment in open infrastructure. Through increased transparency and discoverability, we aim
this tool to foster trust in the decision-making process and to help build connections between
services, users, and funders. The design of Infra Finder is intended to contribute to ongoing
discussions and developments regarding trust and transparency in open scholarly infrastructure, as
well as help level the playing field between organizations with limited resources to conduct
extensive due diligence processes and those with their own analyst teams. In this work, we describe
the landscape analysis that led to the creation of Infra Finder, the use cases for the tool, and the
approach IOI is taking to create and foster use of Infra Finder in the open infrastructure
environment. We also address some of the principles of trust in open source and open
infrastructure that have informed and impacted the Infra Finder project and our work in creating
this tool.