To be FAIR: COAR Controlled Vocabularies

Authors & Affiliation

Jochen Schirrwagen, Isabel Bernal, Kathleen Shearer and Ilkay Holt. Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR)

Abstract

COAR is promoting the adoption of the vocabularies by the repository community in order to improve interoperability across systems, organizations and regions. To that end, COAR has been working with the most common repository software platforms to have the vocabularies integrated directly into their workflows. The adoption of COAR Vocabularies is also encouraged in international and national guidelines for repository and CRIS managers such as the OpenAIRE Content Provider Guidelines, LA Referencia Guidelines and the German DINI Certificate for repositories. The COAR Vocabularies are also integrated and referenced in value added services like the the Phaidra Classification Server of University of Vienna in Austria, and Research Vocabularies Australia operated by the Australian National Data Service (ANDS). Harmonization of vocabulary terms with the CASRAI dictionaries and glossaries is an ongoing task.

So far the COAR Controlled Vocabularies Interest Group has released two vocabularies: Resource Types, to identify the genre of a scholarly output and Access Rights, to declare its degree of ‘openness’. A third vocabulary about Version Types is now under review. These vocabularies are designed to be multilingual and currently support 14 languages. The vocabularies are implemented in the web standard SKOS and released for public reuse under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license.