Role of repositories
Open access (OA) repositories are digital platforms that manage and provide free access to research outputs ensuring that valuable research is disseminated widely for the benefit of society.
Together, repositories are the foundation for open science and open scholarship. While repositories can play a variety of roles, most importantly they collect, manage, preserve and provide access to valuable research and educational content.
Strengthening and maintaining the local management of content through repositories hosted at institutions and research organizations is important for several reasons. Large, centralized services and infrastructure may be easier to market and maintain, but they cannot be as responsive to a diversity of needs and priorities across regions and domains. In addition, local services can engage with the local researchers to help ensure that their outputs are being described and deposited correctly.
Eloy Rodrigues, Chairperson of COAR, explains below the role of repositories and how to leverage repositories to create more sustainable and innovative system for sharing and building on the results of research. This video is part of Open Science MOOC, Module 6: Open Access to Research Papers.
Kathleen Shearer, COAR Executive Director, delivered the keynote speech at the (virtual) Open Repositories Conference 2020 about bibliodiversity. This talk was about diversity, inclusion and equity in scholarly communications. Diversity, inclusion and equity matter, most of all, in a moral sense, because each person has intrinsic value. But for other reasons as well. As has been demonstrated with the covid-19 pandemic, we are all in this together. Our societies and economies are intricately connected, and the problems of one region, group, domain will have an impact on everyone else. We are not living in a highly integrated and connected global world. So it is in all our interests to ensure that the scholarly communication system works for everyone. But also research will simply be better, of higher quality in a diverse, inclusive and equitable system.
COAR and SPARC Europe (with input from IFLA) created this flyer about repositories. It communicates in a concise way the benefits of repositories. The flyer is available both in English and Spanish.
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