The project is focusing its work on the role of project health frameworks such as CHAOSS, FOREST, and POSI in the research ecosystem for software, where both open and proprietary tools help researchers create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge. Nonprofit and government sectors have built and supported a range of much-relied upon open research tools over the last decades; however, nearly all of this “open” activity has been conducted with severely
limited funding. Successful projects have often used a mixture of grants and low-cost institutional membership models to fund their initial emergence (piloting to production), but their growth plateaus and becomes stunted as they age out of “innovation”-oriented grant opportunities and face a marketplace where “open” is often interpreted as meaning “low- or no-revenue.” To thrive, open efforts need various types of operational and maintenance support; making these needs more visible through health measures may help to encourage important investments in these types of support. That visibility may also help to spotlight common needs that could be met through services designed to be shared by a subset of infrastructures.