[BOAI] COAR establishes a global knowledge infrastructure

[Peter Suber]

[Forwarding from Dale Peters of DRIVER.  --Peter Suber.]


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 
(<mailto:peters at sub.uni-goettingen.de>peters at sub.uni-goettingen.de CC: 
<file://lossau@sub.uni-goettingen.de>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-repository.eu/
http://www.driver-support.eu/en/

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