Building a global knowledge commons - ramping up repositories to support widespread change in the ecosystem
Workshop abstract
The extensive international deployment of repository systems in higher education and research institutions, as well as scholarly communities, provides the foundation for a distributed, globally networked infrastructure for scholarly communication. This distributed network of repositories can and should be a powerful tool to promote the transformation of the scholarly communication ecosystem. However, repository platforms are still using technologies and protocols designed almost twenty years ago, before the boom of the web and the dominance of Google, social networking, semantic web and ubiquitous mobile devices. In April 2016, the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) launched a working group to help identify new functionalities and technologies for repositories and develop a road map for their adoption. For the past several months, the group has been working to define a vision for repositories and sketch out the priority user stories and scenarios that will help guide the development of new functionalities. The results of this work will be available in the summer of 2017.
This workshop will present the functionalities and technologies for the next generation of repositories and reflect on how these functionalities will be adopted into the existing software platforms. In addition, participants will discuss the important implications for the network layers, and how repositories will uniformly interact with the networks to provide value added services on top of their content.