Reflecting Back To Find Our Way Forward: Evaluating Ways of Assessing the Health of Digital Curation Tools, Systems, and Infrastructures
Creators: name: Tsang, Emmy
name: Collister, Lauren
name: Wu, Chrys
name: Skinner, Katherine
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2025
Subjects: Sustainability
Community Health
Frameworks
Values
Infrastructure
Curation infrastructure: Tools, systems and services that are in development, Curation infrastructure: Evaluations of existing tools and principles in data curation
IDCC25

description: Over the past two decades, many community health frameworks have been developed to guide infrastructures for research and scholarship, which include digital curation tools and infrastructures, in aligning their activities with values such as openness and equity, and to ensure their long-term health and sustainability. They include the FOREST Framework for Values-Driven Scholarly Communication (https://educopia.org/forest-framework-for-values-driven-scholarly-communication/), the Principles of Open Scholarly Infrastructure (POSI, https://openscholarlyinfrastructure.org/), Community Health Analytics Open Source Software (CHAOSS, https://chaoss.community), and Community Smells (https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/id/eprint/993971/). These frameworks are often co-developed by and with developers and maintainers of infrastructures, and the co-development processes offer opportunities for the infrastructures to come together, discuss, and converge on how to best advance values of openness, transparency, inclusivity, and long-term sustainability in their work. Infrastructures have self-assessed against these frameworks to understand areas of opportunity to ensure that they operate in line with these values and improve their sustainability.

Less is known about how funders and adopters of research and scholarly infrastructure view these frameworks, or how they can be more useful or applicable for them. Through our experience in developing Infra Finder (https://infrafinder.investinopen.org), an open infrastructure discovery tool, and engagement with the participating repository services in the US National Institute of Health Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI), the Invest in Open Infrastructure (IOI) team discovered and learnt more about how funders and adopters — from philanthropies and national research funders to academic institutions — make decisions about open infrastructure funding and adoption. We see opportunities to align community health frameworks with the key drivers, priorities, and concerns in that decision making, to incentivize investment in and adoption of open infrastructure for research. The question is: what (if anything) is missing in the current frameworks, and how do we fill that gap?

In this poster, we will briefly introduce key community frameworks that have been developed and used to assess the community health of scholarly and digital curation infrastructures, including FOREST, POSI, and CHAOSS. We will present a brief history of how they came to be: who they were developed for and with, and where they’ve been used. We will summarize key learnings from the launch of Infra Finder and our engagement with the GREI cohort on how funders, developers, and adopters of open infrastructure have been using these frameworks in guiding their investment in and adoption of open infrastructure. In addition, we will raise critical questions on the future of community health frameworks and their roles in helping stakeholders adopt and invest in tools and infrastructures and in advancing the health and resilience of open infrastructures, and we hope to explore these questions with conference attendees.