Open Access: ARL Awarded $1.2 Million to “Expand and Enhance” SHARE

We’ve been tracking the SHARE project for several years. A few items that will provide some background are linked at the bottom of this post along with some info about a similar type of project from Germany.
Btw, IMLS and Sloan also showed financial support for SHARE on March 28, 2014 when they awarded the project $1 million.

From the Association of Research Libraries (October 21, 2014):

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) has been awarded a joint $1.2 million grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to expand and enhance SHARE’s open data set of research and scholarly activities across their life cycle.
SHARE is an initiative of the Association of Research Libraries carried out in collaboration with the Association of American Universities (AAU), the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU), and the Center for Open Science (COS).
SHARE [SHared Access Research Ecosystem] is an open source project to maximize research impact by making a comprehensive inventory of research widely accessible, discoverable, and reusable. The initiative is accomplishing its mission by collecting data that describes and links to research outputs from many digital sources, and by providing a feed, a search box, and a common application programming interface (API) for people to access the research in real time. SHARE includes data about research grant awards, publications, reports, data sets, data management plans, software code, and more.
SHARE Notify, funded by IMLS and Sloan and developed over the past year and a half, already provides this timely data stream from nearly 60 sources and supplies links to more than two million outputs from researchers around the globe. The SHARE Notify architecture is built on COS’s Open Science Framework, a free, open source, web platform designed to support researchers’ entire work flow from project planning, organization, and execution to archiving and sharing.
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What’s Next
There are two primary elements of SHARE’s Phase II, which will run through early 2017. First, the project team will conduct investigations with several research universities about the value and challenges of tracking and reporting their research activities. At the same time, the team will increase the quantity of sources coming into the SHARE data set, and add or impute missing elements (e.g., author identifier, institution, funding agency) to improve the quality of the data set.
“This is an important data set to make freely and openly available. It will allow for innovation in domains in which only a few groups currently have exclusive access. We look forward to Phase II, which will focus on enhancing the quality and consistency of the data we gather as well as linking related research objects,” said Jeffrey Spies, chief technology officer at the Center for Open Science.
SHARE founding director Tyler Walters said, “With the expansion and enhancement of the SHARE data set in this next phase, universities will be able to use SHARE to better understand their own researchers’ activity and where the institution is positioned within a larger research landscape. Many campus units are responsible for identifying researcher activity and SHARE will help bring common infrastructure to these institution-wide challenges.”

Direct to SHARE Database
Note From Gary Price, infoDOCKET Founder and Editor
A Similar Project From Europe
Note: A similar project out of Germany is BASE, a searchable database (with alerts) operated by Bielefeld University Library and has been available for several years.
BASE (Bielefied Academic Search Engine) is available in English and provides access to about 80 million documents (including a lot of open access content) from close to 4,000 sources from around the world. The database constantly updated with new material gathered using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH).
To learn of NEW material (or older material added to repositories), a user can simply construct a keyword search and use one or more limits/refinements to help focus the search. Then, select to have results shared with them using RSS or ATOM. Tools like IFTTT make it easy to get results delivered to email or other services.
It would be exciting to see SHARE and BASE work together to make each resource better.
Some SHARE Background

• More Metadata: SHARE Research Notification Service Adds Nine New Content Partners

• Research Aggregation, Discovery, & Notification: “Tyler Walters Appointed SHARE Director” (October 6, 2014)

• Beta Release of SHARE Notify Now Available, New Tool Informs You When New Research is Released Online

• (March 28, 2014)ARL’s SHARE Project Awarded $1 Million Grant by IMLS and Sloan Foundation (March 28, 2014)

• ARL’s SHARE (SHared Access Research Ecosystem) Initiative Launches Knowledge Base (May 21, 2014)

• SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE) Project Plan Released (February 6, 2014)

• ARL and Other Higher Ed. Organizations Propose SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE) (June 10, 2013)

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