Guiding Personas for Continuous Science
Understanding the needs, challenges, and motivations of six key groups shaping scientific communication and collaboration.
Infrastructure & Toolmakers
Tools and infrastructure developers design and maintain the underlying systems that power modern science — from data repositories and publishing platforms to analysis pipelines and identity services. Their work enables reproducibility, collaboration, and the long-term preservation of research. Often invisible to end-users, these teams form the backbone of the research ecosystem.
- Build and maintain platforms, standards, and services that support research workflows and publishing
- May be academic projects, open-source communities, startups, non-profit, or commercial vendors
- Often operate behind the scenes to enable discovery, collaboration, reproducibility, and dissemination
- Develop scalable and sustainable infrastructure to support scientific research
- Integrate across tools, disciplines, and workflows
- Ensure interoperability, discoverability, and long-term preservation
- Support reproducible, transparent, and FAIR research practices
- Fragmentation of tools and lack of integration with other platforms
- Difficulty securing sustained funding or institutional support
- Misalignment between infrastructure development and academic reward systems
- Low visibility or recognition despite enabling core research
- High technical and maintenance burdens
- Open standards and APIs for interoperability
- Real use cases and iterative feedback from researchers
- Recognition and credit for tool/infrastructure development
- Collaborative design with domain experts and partners
- Incentives for long-term sustainability
- Mission-driven and values-aligned
- Balance innovation with compatibility and reliability
- Diverse user bases with competing needs
- Operate across technical, academic, and policy boundaries
- GitHub and open-source repositories
- Research infrastructure consortia and working groups
- Developer meetups, hackathons, and forums
- Institutional research IT teams and libraries
- Conferences on research communication and open science
Bringing the Persona to Life¶
Tools and infrastructure developers design and maintain the underlying systems that power modern science — from data repositories and publishing platforms to analysis pipelines and identity services. Their work enables reproducibility, collaboration, and the long-term preservation of research. Often invisible to end-users, these teams form the backbone of the research ecosystem.
- Age: 45
- Medium-sized company (200 people)
- Married to Cassandra, 2 kids
- Based in urban California
- Passion for problem solving, modernizing the way people do things, efficiency
- Biggest need is for context
- Connecting with the people that are using their company’s tools, resources, and staff
- Collaborating with others
