Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) recently released a landmark report, The State of Open Research Software Infrastructure. It is a must-read for anyone involved in building, funding, or relying on the shared digital tools that support research and knowledge. The report provides a clear-eyed assessment of a landscape that feels deeply familiar to us at APTrust and many of our peers.

While the report focuses on research software, its insights are profoundly relevant to the entire open infrastructure ecosystem, including the world of digital preservation. It diagnoses a set of systemic challenges that often leave essential services in a precarious state. But crucially, it also points toward a solution rooted in collaboration, coordination, and community. In this post, we want to reflect on the report’s findings and explore why community-governed models offer a resilient pathway forward.

The Challenge: A Field of "Accidental Infrastructure"

The IOI report paints a picture of a field that remains structurally vulnerable despite its incredible innovation and the passion of its contributors. The ecosystem is described as "fragile" and "fragmented," often relying on short-term grants and the heroic, but ultimately unsustainable, efforts of volunteers (Skinner, Kemp, Thaney, & Tsang, 2025, pp. 15, 17).

One of the report’s most powerful concepts is "accidental infrastructure"—tools and services that grew organically to become critical dependencies for a community, often without a formal plan for their long-term support (p. 30). This reality leads to several challenges:

• An Underdeveloped Market: Most actors lack an "established market, or a set of known and structured interactions, to depend on" (p. 4). This means there are few clear pathways for institutions to support the software they rely on financially.
• Siloed Efforts: Without strong coordination, the landscape can become a "free-for-all that most players can dodge participation in because it is not producing visible information" (p. 20).
• Invisible Labor: So much of the work is like an iceberg; as one interview participant stated, "some is visible, most is not" (p. 13). The immense, hidden effort of maintenance, administration, and user support goes unrecognized and unfunded.

This diagnosis is not an indictment of any single project, but a clear-eyed look at the systemic conditions in which we operate. The report compellingly argues that we must move toward a more intentional and collaborative structure for these essential services to survive and thrive.

The Solution: Investing in Coordination

The report does not just diagnose the problems; it prescribes a solution. Its core recommendations are a call to action to change how we support our shared infrastructure fundamentally. It urges the community to "grow the market" by having institutions make "collective (on behalf of cohorts of institutions) and organizational investments" in the tools they use (p. 25). Furthermore, it calls on funders and organizations to "invest in coordination" and to "encourage actors to rely on each other and to build the necessary service environments" (p. 28).

In short, the report argues that the path to sustainability is not for every project to find its own way in isolation, but for the community to build shared, interdependent support structures.

The Community Model as a Pathway

This is where the power of community-governed models, like the consortium that defines APTrust, becomes clear. A consortium is not just a group of members but a living embodiment of the report's recommendations.

• When the report calls for creating "cohorts that enable entities to tackle this in a collective enterprise" (p. 26), a consortium is that cohort, designed from the ground up for collective action.
• When the report identifies the need for a "set of known and structured interactions" to form a market (p. 24), a consortium's governance and policies provide exactly that framework.
• When the report critiques the inefficiencies of siloed work, a consortium model inherently pools resources and centralizes development to serve a common good, fostering the interdependence the report calls for.

Being a consortium does not make an organization immune to the pressures so accurately described in the IOI report. We face the same fiscal realities and resource challenges as everyone else. However, the community-based structure provides a framework for navigating these challenges together. It creates a dedicated space where stakeholders can have transparent conversations about sustainable funding, long-term maintenance, and shared priorities.

The IOI report gives us all a clearer map of our territory. It validates the challenges many of us have felt for years and provides a shared vocabulary to discuss them. While the fog of uncertainty around sustainability is real, the report illuminates a path that leads directly toward deeper collaboration and community ownership. The future of open infrastructure may depend on our collective willingness to walk that path together.

Thoughts