Over the last couple of years, the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) has been systematically articulating a vision of a new generation of highly distributed but networked repositories and the role that these repositories and services associated with them can play in the evolving system of scholarly communications. It's particularly consistent with developments and aspirations in global open science and scholarship, and perhaps particularly timely given the developments over the past year. While I think that there are some very real challenges in achieving this vision, it's an  important one and deserves to be carefully understood and tracked on an ongoing basis.

COAR has recently released its work plan for 2021 to advance this vision and agenda. See

https://www.coar-repositories.org/files/COAR-Strategy-and-Workplan-20211.pdf

General background can be found linked to www.coar-repositories.org

(Disclosure: CNI is a proud and long-standing member of COAR.)


Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI