Sustaining Dryad: Reconfiguring relationships and 'thinking like a business' to maintain open data infrastructures
Open data infrastructures underpin how open research is practiced across communities. While critical, the longevity of such infrastructures is far from certain, as they grapple with challenges related to technologies, dominant ideologies, and continued funding streams. This paper draws on a mixed-methods study of Dryad, a well-known open data infrastructure, to deeply explore one of these challenges: the quest for stable funding. Our analysis shows how Dryad has carefully reconfigured different forms of relationships and revenue models throughout its history to work towards financial sustainability. We identify four types of relationships with customers, collaborators, and competitors that have been critical to Dryad's financial evolution: reinforcing, forging, positioning, and excluding relationships. We argue that while implementing strategic, business thinking is a critical strategy, it is also one which shapes other factors important in sustainability: interpretations of value(s), community, and governance. We conclude by highlighting emerging tensions that provide insight for other open data infrastructures working to become financially sustainable. As a whole, our analysis focuses not just on financial mechanisms for funding open data infrastructures (although those emerge) but on the relationships which enable them.