Sustaining scientific infrastructures: transitioning from grants to peer production (work-in-progress)

Science now relies on mid-level infrastructure, including shared instruments, cell lines, supercomputing resources, data sets, and software components. These are beyond the facilities and services traditionally provided by individual universities; funding agencies such as the NSF often support their initial creation but their long-term sustainability is a challenge and commercialization is only rarely an option. A promising model, though, is broad-based community support through peer production, often inspired by the organization of open source software projects. Such transitions, though, are not automatic or easy, just as commercialization is not. In this research I am studying successful and unsuccessful attempts to transition, building theory and practical guidance for scientists and funding agencies. In this work-in-progress paper, I present the motivation and background for the study and provide motivation through preliminary description of my first case study.ye