Infrastructure Doesn't Run on Good Wishes and Grants

Letter from the Executive Director, April 2026

In a conversation I had last week with Tasha Mellins-Cohen, Executive Director of COUNTER, she made a wonderful aphorism: “Infrastructure can’t run on grants and good wishes.” This is so completely true, but the principle it captures is one that people broadly either don’t think much about or—to the extent they do—don’t consider a significant problem. However, collectively everyone needs to think about this quite deeply, because lack of investment in infrastructure creates real challenges. 

Many funding organizations are structured around distributing resources to ground-breaking, exciting, and transformative endeavors. These investments have driven remarkable structural change, helped to catalyze significant advances, and overall proven incredibly beneficial. However, such funding bodies have traditionally been less supportive of ongoing maintenance and operations. They prefer to have others do the messy work of supporting the infrastructure we all rely on, because they see their role as funding the next generation of tools, technologies, and advances. Given their collective success, it is hard not to see an underlying wisdom, but the reality is that resources need to come from somewhere to maintain infrastructure.

In February, OpenAlex announced new service pricing tiers for API access to their resources. While basic access to the data remains free, the ability to interact robustly with the service will now be provided on a fee-for-service model. Last month, arXiv announced it would be spinning off of Cornell University, which has served as its home for the past two and a half decades. This follows the merger and launch of an independent organization, OpenRxiv, last year to oversee the bioRxiv and medRxiv preprint services. Each of these transitions is fundamentally driven by the need for additional resources, though independence, governance, and other issues certainly were at play. There are countless similar stories in associations and technology support organizations across our community.  Running infrastructure services, be it a repository of papers or bibliographic data, or simply maintaining the structures that support interoperability, requires time, effort and money.

As with all things technology, there is a humorous XKCD cartoon that encapsulates this precarious situation. The person symbolized in the cartoon, once keen to move on, will probably reach out to a standards organization to support the ongoing maintenance of that infrastructure element. Over the years I have often been the recipient of those requests. In fact, several NISO initiatives were initiated after they were passed to NISO for ongoing support and caretaking. It can be within the scope of NISO to take on this responsibility, and we have done so gladly as part of our mission to sustain standards work to serve the community. Just like the maintenance of servers and bandwidth, the maintenance of information standards requires resources.

Often, we don’t think of the countless hours of volunteer time necessary to keep this infrastructure running. One frequent complaint about the standardization process is the time necessary to complete a project. Rather than complain, I am often astonished that the model of volunteer work to maintain infrastructure works at all. Each of the hundreds of contributors to the dozens of NISO projects has other work to accomplish and almost always has another full-time job to attend to. This time and effort have significant costs, and we all benefit tremendously from the contributions of these participants, as well as from the generosity of their employers to allow this work to proceed. Certainly, there is a business rationale and direct benefits to these companies to have standards work advanced. 

The amount of effort represents no small amount of collective investment. The recently completed NISO Cooperative Collections Lifecycle Project grant effort is a perfect example As part of that initiative, NISO led the development of the forthcoming NISO Cooperative Lifecycle Infrastructure Project (CCLIP) recommended practice, which is finalizing approvals for publication this spring. To develop this project, nearly 100 volunteers engaged in various elements over the course of three years. While this is larger than most projects, the value of the time and expertise these contributors added was significant. We calculated that the community investment in this development effort was more than $620,000, divided by the number of volunteers spread across 82 institutions participating. While the development work was supported by a grant from IMLS, ongoing maintenance of the recommendations, support for promotion, and extensions of this work is still required. NISO and our partners, particularly at PALCI and Lehigh University, who were co-leads on this project, are seeking additional IMLS resources to support the project’s next phase, but this is certainly an outlier in NISO’s portfolio. Most NISO projects are not grant funded, and even those that are funded initially do not receive follow-up support for implementation, adoption, and maintenance.

Which brings me to work underway to maintain NISO standards. Dozens of NISO standards are constantly in a mode of maintenance and constant improvement. Not long after the standard is published, NISO organizes a maintenance committee to support promotion and ongoing adjustments or expansions to the guidance. Some of these groups are extremely active, such as those for the Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS), Knowledge Bases and Related Tools (KBART), SeamlessAccess, or the Transfer working group. These groups meet regularly and consider community requests, work on promotion and feature extensions or even revisions to the standard. For example, KBART Phase III is nearing publication of its updated recommendation. The NISO CRediT Taxonomy Standing Committee is weighing user feedback and is considering an extension of the standard. Each of these projects requires expertise, volunteer effort, and project management by NISO staff, and as NISO’s portfolio has grown over time, so have the resource needs. Organizations that fund the new development work should recognize that this maintenance burden falls on someone, and it is often not the initial grant recipient.

As technology advances, rarely is old technology deprecated and removed from our lives completely. The advent of radio didn’t remove print newspapers from the world. Similarly, television didn’t entirely replace radio. We in the standards community need to continue to evolve and adapt to the latest technologies and develop standards for things like AI systems. However, simultaneously, we also must maintain the last several generations of technologies that still have their place and need to be maintained. The work doesn’t get simpler as technologies grow; it only expands.

Sincerely,

Todd A. Carpenter

Executive Director, NISO