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

[Peter Suber]

[Forwarding from DRIVER.  --Peter Suber.]


<http://www.driver-support.eu/newsevents.php?item=nDRIVERConfed39>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 (<mailto:peters at sub.uni-goettingen.de>peters at sub.uni-goettingen.de, 
CC:<mailto:lossau at sub.uni-goettingen.de>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.

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