This presentation was provided by Kathleen Shearer of COAR, during the NISO Event "Open Access: The Role and Impact of Preprint Servers," held November 14 - 15, 2019.

1. Next Generation Repositories
Kathleen Shearer, Executive Director, COAR
kathleen.shearer@coar-repositories.org

2. COAR is an international association that brings together individual
repositories and repository networks in order to build capacity, align
policies and practices, and act as a global voice for the repository
community.
● Office is based in Germany and Portugal
● Over 150 members and partners
● All 5 continents

3. The context
● Dysfunctionality of the scholarly communication
system:
○ Lack of transparency in peer review, quality
issues/retractions
○ Western biases
○ Lag times from submission to publication,
○ Faulty reward and incentive structures
● Price inflation and increasing vendor control of
traditional journals
● Rise of preprints
● Policy drivers for open research
● Growing interest in “academy-owned infrastructure”

4. Our Vision - A global knowledge commons
“...position repositories as the foundation for a
distributed, globally networked infrastructure for
scholarly communication, on top of which layers of value
added services will be deployed, thereby transforming
the system, making it more research-centric, open to and
supportive of innovation, while also collectively managed
by the scholarly community.”

5. Not exactly a new vision...
“a relatively complete
raw archive unfettered by
any unnecessary delays
in availability”, on top of
which “[a]ny type of
information could be
overlayed … and
maintained by any third
parties”, including tools
for validation, filtering
and communication
(Ginsparg, 1994)

6. Next Generation Repositories (NGRs) is an ongoing initiative of
COAR launched in 2016 to identify common behaviours,
protocols and technologies that will enable new and improved
functionalities for repository systems.

7. Distribution of control
Distributed control, or governance, of scholarly resources (pre-prints, post-prints, research data,
supporting software, etc.) and scholarly infrastructures is an important principle which
underpins this work. Distributed networks are more sustainable and at less risk to
monopolisation or failure.
Inclusiveness and diversity
Different institutions and regions have unique and particular needs and contexts (e.g diverse
language, policies and priorities). A distributed network will aim to reflect and be responsive to
the different needs and contexts of different regions, disciplines and countries.
Interoperability
Repositories will adopt common behaviours, functionalities and standards ensuring
interoperability across institutions and enabling them to engage in a common way with external
service providers
Public good
The technologies, architectures and protocols will be openly available, using global standards
when they are available and applicable.
Sustainability
Key institutions and research organizations in scholarly communication will be partners,
contributing to the uptake and long-term sustainability of resources. Dedicated tasks will ensure
community-led governance and sustainability structures.
Intelligent openness and accessibility
Scholarly resources will be made openly available and in accessible formats, whenever possible,
in order increase their value and maximize their re-use for the benefit for scholarship and
society.

8. Current repositories
Services we can
develop with
repositories today
Persistence layer Persistence layer
Interoperability Interoperability
Metadata
Usage
interactions
and metrics
Content
Links
between
resources
Notifications
Global sign-on
Comments Peer-reviews Messages
Metadata
Services we can
develop with the next
generation of
repositories
Next generation repositories
Conceptual layer
Conceptual layer
By Petr Knoth
8

9. Three requirements
1. New technologies: The current technologies
used in repositories are out of date and cannot
support the value added services
2. Common behaviours: All repositories must
exhibit a common set of behaviours and
standards
3. Value added services: We need to build new
and innovative services on top of the distributed
repository content

10. http://bit.ly/ngr-report http://ngr.coar-
repositories.org

11. NGR behaviours and technologies
● Exposing Identifiers
● Declaring Licenses at the
Resource Level
● Discovery Through Navigation
● Interacting with Resources
(Annotation, Commentary, and
Review)
● Resource Transfer
● Batch Discovery
● Collecting and Exposing
Activities
● Identification of Users
● Authentication of Users
● Exposing Standardized Usage
Metrics
● Preserving Resources
● Activity Streams 2.0
● COUNTER
● Creative Commons Licenses
● ETag
● HTTP Signatures
● IPFS
● IIIF
● Linked Data Notifications
● ORCID
● OpenID Connect
● ResourceSync
● SUSHI
● SWORD
● Signposting
● Sitemaps
● Social Network Identities
● Web Annotation Model and
Protocol
● WebID
● WebID/TLS
● WebSub
● Webmention
Behaviours Technologies

12. Use cases
Discovery - As a web reference manager, annotation tool, or
crawler, when I encounter a landing page or any other web
resource that is part of a scholarly object, I need to easily identify
the associated persistent HTTP URI for the resource, so that I can
retrieve it.
Social network - As a user, I want to receive recommendations
about content that is of potential interest to me and related to
my work, so I increase my knowledge in my field.
Assessment / peer review - As a user, I want to be able to
comment or review the work of my colleagues and have those
reviews (and reviewers) publicly available to other readers, so
that the quality of these a resource can be assessed by others.
Preservation - As a scholar or institution, I want my research
outputs to be available over the long term and remain as a
permanent part of the scholarly record.

13. This means… unbundling the scholarly journal
5 functions of scholarly publishing:
1. Registration
2. Certification
3. Awareness
4. Archiving
5. Rewarding
Why do all of these functions have to be centralized?

14. Implementation: piloting and profiling

15. Overlay journals
“The editors of an overlay journal locate suitable material from open access
repositories and public domain sources, read it, and evaluate its worth. This
evaluation may take the form of the judgement of a single editor or editors,
or a full peer review process.” (Wikipedia: “Overlay Journal”, accessed Oct
2019)
● Built on arXiv
● No charges for readers or
authors
● Authors submit articles

16. Advances in Combinatorics - Estimated Costs
Expense CAD USD Euro
Scholastica
subscription
$1597.42 $1188.00 €1060.19
Scholastica
author
submission
fees
$336.18 $250.00 €223.13
Domain name $11.00 $8.18 €7.30
In-kind staff $1073.8 $798.8 €712.8
Total $3018.4 $2244.98 €2003.42
Estimates do not include the cost of running arXiv
This is the same price (or less) than 1 APC article!

18. From open access to open science
All valuable research contributions should be available and recognized
Data Sharing!

19. FAIR metrics on repository workflow
19
D. Fripp, T. Davey (2019) A proposal to add a FAIR metric to the Jisc Open Research Hub https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2619356

20. Libraries as an Open Global Platform
Bridging two critical issues
Institutions provide stable
funding and long term access
Research communities
provide peer review and
networking

21. What is different from Paul Ginsparg’s original
1994 vision?
This is not about,
• A single platform, server, or repository
• Building a centralized service
• Supporting a single domain or discipline
This is about,
• Connecting Individual “resources” in a highly
distributed environment
• Ensuring Interoperability (through common
vocabularies, protocols and standards)
• Supporting a variety of community-defined peer
review and assessment processes

22. Imagine the potential…

23. Multi-stakeholder meeting in January 2020 to begin to
define the vocabularies, standards and protocols to
move this vision forward.
Stay tuned!
Thanks
and
Questions