COAR advances the vision of a global knowledge commons.

The notion of a “commons” is that certain resources are a public good and should be available to all members of society. The knowledge commons applies this notion to information and knowledge. The transition to Open Science (or Open Scholarship) and the knowledge commons means adopting new approaches to the design, funding, assessment and governance of scholarly communications.

Diversity is an extremely important characteristic of the knowledge commons. However, “bibliodiversity” has been in serious decline for decades due to an increasing concentration of infrastructures and the intense pressure on researchers to publish in high impact journals. Yet diversity in scholarly communications services and infrastructure is critical to support the different workflows, languages, scholarly products, and research topics from different research communities.

COAR has  working with other organizations to explore new pathways and models that will help nurture a diverse and inclusive knowledge commons. We recognize that fostering diversity will not happen without effort and intention and will require significant coordination in order to avoid a fragmented system or a growth in centralization. In April 2020, COAR published a “Call for Action!“, which urges the research community to actively address the issues related to declining bibliodiversity.

Below you will find the recommended actions for different groups, as well as links to related resources.