Conferations and consortia in Open Access


An alternative to the systematic commercialisation of Open Access data is the formal constitution of COAR: the Confederation of Open Access Repositories, scheduled to take place in Open Access Week 2009.

http://www.driver-repository.eu/DRIVER-COAR.html

 

Emerging as the sustainable outcome of the DRIVER infrastructure, COAR is a community-driven approach, where institutions can determine how they want their repositories to be deployed.  The action plan is directed towards international organisational support for Open Access in research infrastructures around the globe.

COAR utilises the tremendous synergies emerging in higher education between repositories, researchers and research funders to coordinate collaborative networks in the vision of a global knowledge infrastructure. 

Once the legal and technical infrastructures for OA dissemination reach the coverage and maturity that satisfies the researcher's data-sharing concerns and matches the respect that WorldCat enjoys, third party service providers, such as OCLC offer to OAIster, become equitable partners without questionable terms and conditions.

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 “eInfrastructures”.

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 €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@sub.uni-goettingen.de, CC: lossau@sub.uni-goettingen.de).

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Dr D Peters

Scientific Technical Manager DRIVER II

State and University Library of Goettingen

peters@sub.uni-goettingen.de

Tel:  +49 551 39 5242

Fax: +49 551 39 5222

Mobile:+49 (0)160 989 67663

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