On July 9 and 10, three major regional open access repository networks and aggregators (OpenAire, LA Referencia, and SHARE), along with the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) and Center for Open Science (COS) met in Charlottesville, Virginia to discuss synergies and potential areas of collaboration.
Open access repositories are being adopted around the world to support and promote open science, a trend which maximizes our investments in research by making research outputs freely available to the world. Many of these repositories are connected via regional aggregators, which form sustainable, distributed repository networks that provide access to and preservation of the valuable content created through research and scholarship.
However, research is international, with researchers collaborating across regions and continents to solve the world’s most critical problems such as climate change, health, economics, and so on. The aim of this meeting was to ensure that regional repository networks are complementary, more integrated, and working together to create a seamless global network.
The meeting was very productive and revealed that the objectives, technologies and use cases for all three networks are highly aligned and that there is a strong willingness to work together. In particular, a number of specific areas were identified in which the networks commit to collaborate on:
- Regular data exchange: Exchange data and develop agreements around jurisdictional harvesting and aggregation leading to greater coverage and efficiencies across regions.
- Common metadata and vocabularies: Work towards consensus about key metadata elements and common vocabularies to express funders and institutional affiliations, open access status, and project IDs. This will contribute to the COAR-CASRAI work already underway aimed at developing common metadata elements and support repository managers in better exposing their collections.
- Common technological services: Assess the feasibility of adopting common broker/router technologies and other services.
- Ongoing dialogue: Meet regularly to share approaches and perspectives about technical and strategic challenges.
Over the next several weeks, the groups will develop a more detailed plan for achieving specific outcomes.
For more information about the meeting, please contact: Kathleen Shearer, Executive Director, COAR: kathleen.shearer@coar-repositories.org.
List of Meeting Participants
- Erin Braswell, Developer, Center for Open Science
- Alberto Cabezas, Executive Secretary, LA Referencia
- Fabian von Feilitzsch, Developer, Center for Open Science
- Paolo Manghi, OpenAIRE Technical Director
- Natalia Manola, OpenAIRE Director
- Lautaro Matas, IT Manager, LA Referencia
- Brian Nosek, Co-founder, Executive Director, Center for Open Science
- Judy Ruttenberg, Program Director, Association of Research Libraries and SHARE Project Manager
- Andrew Sallans, Partnerships, Collaborations, & Funding Manager, Center for Open Science
- Kathleen Shearer, Executive Director, Confederation of Open Access Repositories
- Jeff Spies, Co-founder, Chief Technology Officer, Center for Open Science
- Tyler Walters, Dean, University Libraries, Virginia Tech and Director, SHARE
About us
COAR: COAR, the Confederation of Open Access Repositories, is an international association with over 100 members and partners from five continents representing universities, research institutions, government research funders, and others. COAR’s mission is to enhance the visibility and application of research outputs through a global network of open access digital repositories. COAR brings together the major repository initiatives in order to align policies and practices and acts as a global voice for the repository community.
COS: The Center for Open Science was founded in 2013 in Charlottesville, Virginia. COS began with one infrastructure project, the Open Science Framework, one research project, Reproducibility Project: Psychology, and a mission: to increase openness, integrity, and reproducibility of scientific research. That mission guides all of our work. Today, we are a team of about 50 people supporting a much larger collection of communities that are producing tools and services to align scientific practices with scientific values.
LA Referencia: LA Referencia gives visibility to the scientific production of institutions of higher education and research in Latin America. It promotes open access to full texts, with special emphasis on publicly funded results and supports national open access strategies for repositories in Latin America. The service is based on technical and organizational agreements between nine public science and technology organizations (Ministries and ONCYTs ) with RedCLARA, the organization that manages Latin America’s high speed network.
OpenAIRE: OpenAIRE is a European Commission funded initiative operating an interoperable and validated network of more than 610 repositories and OA journals, integrating more than 11 million OA publications with links to 7,000 datasets, with 50,000 organizations and 30,000 projects from three funders. It has identified over 200,000 FP7 publications from about half the 26,000 EC’s FP7 projects, and offers literature-data integration services. OpenAIRE has 50 partners, from all EU countries and beyond, that collaborate on a large-scale initiative that aims to promote open scholarship and substantially improve the discoverability and reusability of research publications and data.
SHARE: SHARE is a higher education initiative whose mission is to maximize research impact by making a comprehensive inventory of research widely accessible, discoverable, and reusable. To fulfill this mission SHARE is creating an openly available data set about research activities across their life cycle. By collecting, connecting, and enhancing scholarly metadata, SHARE will simplify how various research activities and outputs—from data management plans and grant proposals to preprints, journal articles, and data repository deposits—can be identified as elements of a single research project.