Carlos Rossel, World Bank Publisher, notes: “It will be very interesting for us to know more about, or be actively involved with, the work of COAR. As a next step in our OA journey we are looking to make the Bank’s Open Knowledge Repository (OKR) interoperable with other institutional reposito-ries, particularly in developing countries.” Norbert Lossau, Chairperson of COAR Executive Board, adds: “We are very glad to welcome World Bank to the COAR community. The development World Bank has taken during the last two years, based on courageous and foresightful decisions, are really impressive. I am convinced that close working relations in our network will be of large profit for the research community as well as the general public and help to make research outputs accessi-ble to everyone.”

About World Bank
The World Bank is the largest single source of development knowledge. The World Bank Open Knowledge Repository (OKR) is The World Bank’s official open access repository for its research outputs and knowledge products. Through the OKR, The World Bank collects, disseminates, and permanently preserves its intellectual output in digital form.
More information about World Bank is available at the https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/.

The half hour interview touched several issues, incl. the methodology of the ranking, the developments since its  inception in 2008 and impact in the repository scene.

Special thanks to Olaf Siegert, COAR Repository Observatory member of ZBW, Germany for conducting the interview.

You can view the video here.

Pages that are available in Chinese are the “About COAR” (关于COAR) including the translation of the COAR leaflet, “Aims and Objectives” (宗旨和目标) and the “Frequently Asked Questions” (COAR常见问题).

Our dedicated thanks go to Xiaowei and we hope in the future we can translate more pages and sections of the COAR website into other languages with the support of our members.

The Oxford meeting focussed on two recommendations of the GSO Report and the relationship of the G8 O5 group with the newly formed Research Data Alliance, RDA (Alicia Lopez-Medina reports on the Inaugural Meeting of the RDA in Gothenburg from the 18-20 March in this newsletter).

The two recommendations addressing Data e-Infrastructures read as follows:

Recommendation 9 – e-infrastructure
Global research infrastructure initiatives should recognize the utility of the integrated use of advanced e-infrastructures, services for accessing and processing, and curating data, as well as remote participation (interaction) and access to scientific experiments.

Recommendation 10 – data exchange
Global scientific data infrastructure providers and users should recognise the utility of data exchange and interoperability of data across disciplines and national boundaries as a means to broadening the scientific reach of individual data sets.

In the discussion many topics were raised, incl., the following (picked up randomly):

• Are publically funded data a public good?
• How do we ensure preservation and access?
• How do we make data discoverable and exchangeable?
• How do we protect privacy? How do we protect IP?
• How do we ensure appropriate Recognition?
• How do we cover costs?
• How do we involve research institutions/universities?
• How do we address governance on a regional/global level?
• How do we ensure data quality (Good scientific practice, Research Integrity)
• How do we ensure that data in Continents like Africa is included?
• Multiplication of activities , Top-Down, bottom-up, we lose opportunities,
• Public-private partnership (US, benefit from practice)
• Translation of data, semantics, language (China)
• Data management for business is missing (Japan)
• In the last ten years we had digital divide, now we could have „data divide“ and some large companies taking over (China)

The WG felt that a white paper would be valuable, describing 5 relevant topics for global data infrastructures, such as:

• Traceability, Persistent identifier
• Registries
• Standards how to acknowledge the re-use of data
• Metrics
• Ownership
• Who is going to provide infrastructures?
• Skills
• Quality assurance, reproducibility
• Recognition system
• Interoperability

Interoperability was highlighted as one of the central topics which gave me the opportunity to point to the „COAR Briefing paper on Interoperability“ and the crucial messages described in this ressource.

As for the Research Data Alliance there was broad consensus among the participants that the RDA will be very useful in the research data area. Funders should provide policy advice to the more technical and operational working RDA groups. As the geographic scope of RDA stakeholders is currently focussed on the EU, U.S. and Australia I pointed to the successful model of COAR as truly globally acting organisation and its potential to reach out in particular to research institutions, universities and organisations. COAR members are mainly infrastructure institutions, providing necessary expertise and sustainability for global infrastructures, going beyond research data and addressing potentially all types of relevant research and learning material.

Among the participants there was a split view on the potential role of research libraries, some of them doubting that they will be able to become relevant actors in the field, others strongly requesting their input and support. I pointed to LIBER, the European Research Libraries Organisations that has included research infrastructures as one of their main objectives in the Strategy Plan 2013-2015.

As a conclusion I think it is utterly important for infrastructure institutions to find and claim their role in the emerging global activities. COAR is the hitherto only truly international community to enable these global research and information infrastructures and we should partner with other communities such as RDA or on regional level with RedClara (Latin-America), DRF (Japan), Institutional Repository Grid (China) or LIBER (Europe) to move forward.

Norbert Lossau, 14 April 2013

On behalf of COAR Jochen Schirrwagen (Bielefeld University, Germany) will represent the international perspective from Open Access repositories.

Doctoral degree awardees are obliged to make their theses accessible on the Internet with aid from degree awarding institutions. In practice, theses will be made available to the public through the institutional repository of each university.

We hope this revised rules will lead to open access to virtually all of over ten thousand PhD theses submitted each year, though the content of approximantely 48,000 of those available on the repositories as of 31 March 2013.

The Research Data Alliance launch and first plenary took place in Gothenburg from 18 to 20 March 2013. At its first plenary, the RDA was launched by sponsors from the European Commission, the U. S. Government and the Australian Government and leaders in the data community.

Individuals representing stakeholders from the sciences, infrastructures, technology providers, libraries, etc. were present at the meeting. Major initiatives and organizations across the world were also represented, including LIBER, OpenAIRE and COAR (see list of participants)

The Plenary was a working meeting to accelerate discussion, Working and Interest Group interaction, and data community development. The true measure of the alliance’s work, will be the outcome of the efforts of the various working groups that are being assembled to evaluate and shape the research projects that they select in the future.

Interesting and relevant for our community were the formally established Working Groups [Data]Persistent Identifiers, Practical Policy Working Group and the discussions at the Interest Groups like Legal Interoperability, Metadata, Contextual Metadata, Repository Audit and Certification or Preservation e-Infrastructure. The importance of the repositories community contribution in those discussions was mentioned.

Different people with different interests gathered together in an “umbrella” interest group finally titled “Publishing Data”. Many related different issues arised in the discussion of this group, e.g. recommendations on data citations, workflows involved in data publication, linking data and publications, perhaps including data peer review. This “umbrella” might finally split in different interest groups and eventually in some Working Groups. But that has to be discussed over the next months. This could be a discussion to get involved.

All these Groups will report back the next RDA meeting, mid-September in Washington, on tangible results for the working groups, if some new working groups have materialize into specific actions from the Interest groups, and what ideas are still valid or not.

While throughout the speeches as well as in some groups there were allusions to the role of digital repositories, these mainly related to big data repositories and to data centers. In this sense, the data generated by the researchers in their institutions and universities as well as the role of the institutional repositories and repositories infrastructures to manage these data, was not clearly recognized.

There was a question upraised: a researcher, in his university, asking: “Where do I put that data that you declared in your data management plan is vital to the community?”

Major research universities are grappling with their response to the deluge of scientific data emerging through research by their faculty. This means addressing the challenges of the “long tail data” or “small data” Many are looking to their libraries and the institutional repository as a solution. Researchers, at research institutions and universities need a repository for collaboration and data publication and storage at all stages of the scientific endeavor. They need to be provided a workspace for work-in-progress, and for collaborative or large-scale projects.

And it was a general homage to the unsung hero, the data manager or data curator and a general agreement about the “desperate” need to train researchers, students, librarians and repository managers in the new skills and competencies required.

Both are some of the major issues the community of open access repositories can contribute to the global effort of the RDA Alliance community, and COAR can make it possible.

Besides its strengths the three initiatives identified some gaps , i.e they would welcome a more horizontal approach within each of the fiches. Involvement of all relevant stakeholders (for example, researchers, research institutions, universities, libraries, repositories, data centers, publishers etc.) is essential for the supporting of discoverability, navigation and (re)use of research data and literature. Additionally more attention to research institutions and the long-tail of research is needed. The fiches should give more importance to universities to establish skills and services. In addition the development of a clear workflow between research institutions and data centres should be supported.

In conclusion, the group aggrees that: