Launch of COAR, the 'Confederation of Open Access Repositories', and DRIVER Confederation Summit

From: Karen Van Godtsenhoven <Karen.VanGodtsenhoven_at_UGENT.BE>
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:17:03 +0200

DRIVER Press release :

 

Launch of COAR, the 'Confederation of Open Access Repositories', and
DRIVER Confederation Summit

 

On October 20th, the DRIVER II project will host an international
Confederation Summit at the  Booktower in Ghent, home to DRIVER's
Belgian project partner, University Library Ghent. An assembly of
international strategic partners in the field of Open Access to
scholarly communication will convene in order to celebrate the
achievements of the  DRIVER II project  and to reflect on the uptake
of DRIVER in national and international repository communities that
provide a head start into the future of scientific repository
infrastructure.  Within DRIVER II, one of the objectives was to build
an international Confederation to promote greater visibility and
application of research outputs through global networks of Open
Access digital repositories.  In a process of consultation with the
international repository community, the Confederation has emerged,
poised to support and coordinate global collaborative efforts towards
the provision and exchange of high-quality Open Access data in an
interoperable global knowledge infrastructure.

The DRIVER Confederation Summit will serve also to launch the new
international organisation, COAR: the Confederation of Open Access
Repositories, observing the partnerships that mark the achievement of
this significant association of content providers, international
repository federations and affiliated organisations.  COAR aims to
support the expansion of open access through developing
international, interoperable standards; advocating for open access
policies with research funders and institutions; and working to
improve deposit rates at repositories.  Founding members of COAR are
stakeholder organisations from European counties as well as
international members from Japan, China, Canada and the United
States.

Described by Subbiah Arunachalam, a protagonist of Open Access, as
`reaching the unreached', the extension of the vision of DRIVER from
a primarily European focus to serve the development of a global
knowledge infrastructure.  The success of DRIVER in achieving an
unprecedented level of interoperability between European repositories
commands a wider organisational infrastructure to link confederations
of repositories across continents around the globe in support of new
models of scholarly communication.  The vision of a global knowledge
infrastructure is enabled in the sharing of scalable information
technologies and Open Access models of information dissemination and
data re-use.

 

COAR will be launched during Open Access Week 2009. Please contact Dr
Dale Peters (peters_at_sub.uni-goettingen.de,
CC:lossau_at_sub.uni-goettingen.de) to register your interest in
becoming a member of COAR.

 

DRIVER II is a project funded by the EC under FP7.

 
Received on Wed Oct 14 2009 - 19:16:22 BST