Many research core facilities and labs have ad hoc methods of tracking usage, billing, or resource planning for usage of their resources (e.g. microscopy, genomics, etc). In addition, many of these facilities are shared across institutions, most tools do not support cross institution concepts for discovering resources.

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In this support project, a tool was developed to offer these capabilities. Whilst the original scope of the project was to implement features for a number of research groups at ETH Zurich and the University of Basel, Open IRIS now has 17 Swiss organisations with users registered in the system (Open IRIS is integrated with AAI to all Swiss universities). These organisations span universities, institutes, hospitals, and commercial organisations that are working together to optimise and share research resources.

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The use of the system has also extended well beyond Switzerland with users in many other countries as well. In total there are currently approximately 4000 users registered in the platform covering 85 organisations in 12 countries. It has around 150 resource providers registered with over 1000 resources in the system. In 2016, over 1880 users were added to the system with hundreds of logins per day.

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In addition, Open IRIS was the winner 2017 of the S-Lab/UKSPA Laboratory Effectiveness Award, in recognition of the contribution that it has made to laboratory efficiency.