Repository of the future, International agreement signed at Ca’ Foscari

In the era of the web and open access, scientific knowledge looks for and finds ‘home’ in digital archives. However, publications, data and multimedia contents must be managed with up-to-date tools, methods and skills shared with involved institutions.

To pursue this objective, an International agreement for Repository networks was signed at Ca’ Foscari during the annual Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) meeting.

The confederation gathers the repository community to create understanding, align policies and practices, and to act as a global voice for the repository community. 75 delegates from 40 countries - representatives of libraries, universities, institutes for research and governors from all over the world - were involved. The university library System (SBA) is part of the COAR and organised the meeting.

The International agreement, signed by eight regional organisations among which include the OpenAIRE network in Europe, will bring a greater alignment and an interoperability to the repository networks, as well as reinforcing the Open Access infrastructure distributed all over the world.

“We share a common vision of a distributed, community-based open science infrastructure around the world” – explained Eloy Rodrigues, COAR president – “But to achieve this vision, we need to work together”.

In this way, the networks will guarantee that their regional service will be interoperable, offering a greater global vision of research results. Furthermore, they will work together to support the widespread adoption of new technologies and services.

The COAR Next Generation Repositories work group presented a series of scenarios for the future of the repositories, such as the functionality of peer review and commenting on the repository contents, the functionalities of social networking  and improved workflows for users. These scenarios guide the technical recommendations of the workgroup, that should be published in the summer of 2017.

“In anticipation of the launch of the European Open Science Cloud” – explained Dorit Raines, President of SBA – “Ca’ Foscari University feels the need to prepare for the evolution of our repository with a coherent policy of Data Management that also takes datasets and other types of digital objects into consideration”.

Along these lines there is also the Rector’s announcement on the launch of a series of new services reserved for group or individual research projects within Ca’ Foscari University, launching in a few weeks on behalf of the University’s Area for Informatics and Telecommunications Services (ASIT).

Enrico Costa