Funding

gitgap is an open infrastructure project. The gap detection pipeline, globe, and API are free and self-hostable. Sustainability comes from institutional partnerships, grants, and community sponsorship — not advertising or venture capital.

No VC. No ads. The gap index must remain unbiased. Commercial interests that weight which gaps appear or how prominently they appear would corrupt the core value of the system. gitgap will not accept funding that requires this.

Open source core — always free

The gap detection pipeline, NAUGHT→CAUGHT→FOUND lifecycle, globe visualization, keeper review, and full API are open source and will remain free. Self-hosting requires only Python 3.11+ and SQLite — no cloud dependency.

Sustainability models

ModelDescriptionStatus
GitHub Sponsors Individual and organizational sponsorship. Sponsors get listed in the index, nothing else — no feature prioritization, no ad placement. Planned
Institutional hosting Universities and research institutes that want a managed gitgap instance with SLA, dedicated reconcile capacity, and priority journal onboarding. Proposed
Journal partnerships Journals that want priority aggregation, enhanced reconcile frequency (hourly vs. daily), and direct editorial system integration. Proposed
NSF / NIH grants Gap detection supports open science, reproducibility, and research infrastructure goals — aligned with NSF FAIROS RCN, NIH data commons, and NLM programs. Actively pursuing. In progress
Open Collective Transparent community funding — income and expenses public. For contributors who want to support without a GitHub account. Planned

Grant alignment

gitgap addresses several active grant priorities in the research infrastructure space:

  • Open science infrastructure — NSF's FAIROS RCN (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable Open Science) explicitly funds gap detection and knowledge graph infrastructure.
  • Research reproducibility — The rejected trail and pickup instructions directly support reproducibility by preserving what was tried, why it failed, and what the next attempt needs.
  • NIH NLM data commons — Gap detection from PMC literature aligns with NLM's mandate to make biomedical knowledge findable and actionable.
  • AI in research infrastructure — NAUGHT→CAUGHT→FOUND is a formalization of AI-assisted research discovery, which is an active area of interest for multiple funding bodies.

What funding enables

The current bottleneck is journal coverage — more journals means more gaps, more convergence detection, more structural holes surfaced. Funding targets, in priority order:

  1. Vector DB migration — scaling the similarity search from in-memory to pgvector or Qdrant (Phase 5)
  2. Publisher API integrations — PLOS, Springer Nature, Europe PMC, Frontiers (Phase 5)
  3. Hosted public instance — gitgap.io with managed reconcile and discovery probes
  4. OAI-PMH crawler — automated discovery of OJS endpoints from DOAJ journal list

Contact

For institutional partnerships, grant collaboration, or sponsorship inquiries, contact Eric D. Martin — ORCID 0009-0006-5944-1742.