PRESS RELEASE
COAR establishes a global knowledge infrastructure
The international Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR)
was launched in Ghent on 21 October, during Open Access Week 2009.
The aim of the organisation is the networking of over 1000 global
scientific repositories comprising peer reviewed publications under
the principle of Open Access. This will be achieved by means of
common data standards and the co-ordination of scientific research
policy development. Coinciding with the sixth anniversary of the
Berlin Declaration to provide free and unrestricted access to
sciences and human knowledge representation worldwide, COAR takes
responsibility for the execution of this vision in bringing together
scientific repositories in a wider organisational infrastructure to
link confederations across continents and around the globe in support
of new models of scholarly communication.
"The networking of online publications and research data sets will
open new opportunities for research and the teaching of all
disciplines in the 21st century", said the founding Chairperson, Dr
Norbert Lossau, Director of the State and University Library of
Goettingen, emphasising the significance of COAR. "As proven
managers of information, libraries are working hand in hand with
information specialists, computer scientists and researchers to lend
reality to a world-wide network of scientific repositories."
COAR emerged from the European DRIVER project, (Digital Repository
Infrastructure Vision for European Research), funded by the EU
Commission under the 6th and 7th Framework Programmes for
e-Infrastructures. Among the 28 founding members of COAR, 23
organisations are based in 13 European countries; others in China
(Chinese Academy of Sciences), Japan (National Institute of
Informatics and the Digital Repository Federation), Canada (Canadian
Association of Research Libraries) and the USA (University of Arizona
for the Global Registries Initiative). As the membership continues
to grow, interest in COAR is reflected in numerous related
organisations, such as the SURF Foundation, JISC, SPARC Europe and
eIFL.net, as well as OCLC and Microsoft Research, all of whom support
of a common strategic objective to make research findings freely
accessible to science and society.
The early bird membership fee of EURO 100 is valid until 31 December
2009, open to not-for-profit organisations engaged in higher
education, as well as individuals who support the aims of the
Association. To register your own interest in becoming a member of
COAR, please contact Dr Dale Peters (peters_at_sub.uni-goettingen.de CC:
lossau_at_sub.uni-goettingen.de)
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Dr D Peters
Scientific Technical Manager DRIVER II
State and University Library of Goettingen
peters_at_sub.uni-goettingen.de
Tel: +49 551 39 5242
Fax: +49 551 39 5222
Mobile:+49 (0)160 989 67663
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http://www.driver-repository.eu/
http://www.driver-support.eu/en/
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Received on Wed Oct 28 2009 - 20:34:34 GMT