SURVEY RESULTS
Earlier this year, Open Fung conducted a survey with the goal of better understanding unmet needs in our field. We asked about the impact of different open science tools and we’re using what we heard from all of you to guide our work.
Between May 19 and June 15, 2025, 127 active applied mycologists worldwide responded. Collectively, they reported a total of 854 years of experience in the area, ranging from half a year to 40 years! Respondents work with fungi in industry, academia, the arts, community science and government, and create biomaterials, art, work with fungi in the environment or for food and medicine.Many work across multiple of these contexts.
What respondents had to say:
- For all 31 specific open science or scaling tools we asked about, 65-90% of our diverse respondents predicted a positive impact on their work.
- Among the tools many reported could positively impact their work, there was strong interest in an open community of fungal innovators, resources for measuring and imaging fungi and materials, bioinformatics and automation tools, information to help adapt local fungi and substrates to purpose, methods for fungal cultivation, breeding and engineering.
- None of these tools are already widely available to respondents: only 6% of total responses were “I can already access this tool.”
- We weren’t surprised that a few respondents said they could access most of the tools they needed. What did surprise us was that even some well-resourced and highly experienced practitioners in academia and industry have key gaps holding them back. This held across all fungal applications, levels of experience and organization sizes and types.
- Though about half of our respondents worked in industry, fewer than 1% of all individual responses predicted any of the open resources would have a negative impact on their work.
We’re so grateful for the generosity of those across the globe who took time to share their insights with us!