Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) Europe and European Digital Repository Research Infrastructure (Driver) have signed an agreement to work together for promoting repositories. The cooperation is seen to help progress and enhance the provision, visibility and application of European research outputs through digital repositories, in systems providing access to texts, data or other types of content.
Driver is a joint initiative of European stakeholders, co-financed by the European Commission, setting up a technical infrastructure for digital repositories and facilitating the building of an umbrella organisation for digital repositories. The programme relies on research libraries for the sustainable operation of repositories and provision of high quality content through digital repositories.
SPARC Europe and Driver have expressed the shared vision that research institutions should contribute actively and cooperatively to a common, pan-European data and service infrastructure based on digital repositories. In recent years, research libraries have been pressed to improve scholarly communication by establishing digital repositories to expose institutional research outputs to the world. Networks of individual repositories and overarching information services for aggregation, retrieval, share and re-use are being built on the basis of institutional national and regional location, or by subject areas.
Collaboration between SPARC Europe and Driver is framed by their joint support for an open access model for repositories in research institutions. They will present a common lobby at a national and international level to leverage change through the scholarly community within respective institutions and countries. Their reciprocal support is seen to ensure wider access to standards for interoperability between repositories, and the adoption of emerging technical standards to facilitate open archiving. The agreement is viewed as demonstrating their joint commitment to promote a European network of repositories offering access to research outputs across institutional and national boundaries.
SPARC Europe is an alliance of 110 research-led university libraries from 14 European countries. It is affiliated with US-based SPARC, which represents over 200 institutions, mainly in North America.
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