Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) works to increase the investment in and adoption of open infrastructure to further equitable access to and participation in research. From our research and community engagement work over the past years, we have heard from decision makers at institutions and funders who would like to adopt and invest in open infrastructure about their pain points in discovering and evaluating open infrastructure services.

Building on these insights, we are developing Infra Finder, a tool that will support decision makers in making informed decisions about adopting and investing in open infrastructure. This new tool evolves from the Catalog of Open Infrastructure Services (COIs) prototype and will launch in December 2023 with 60 services enabling the sharing of research publications and data.

In this talk, we will introduce Infra Finder, including its design principles and development process. Particularly, we’d like to share the lessons we’ve learnt in collaborating with open infrastructure services and with decision makers in co-creating this tool, such that it would be useful and beneficial for both groups. We will also demo Infra Finder and outline the roadmap for its development.

We believe that Infra Finder has great potential in not only increasing the adoption of open infrastructure, but also in fostering collaboration and knowledge exchange between open infrastructure services. We’d love to use this opportunity to solicit feedback from the OPERAS community on how we can increase the utility and value of this tool for these communities, and ultimately support open scholarly communication and research in social sciences and humanities.