Several Canadian Research Libraries are Providing Funding to Ensure Vast Majority of Dspace Repositories Around The World Can Be Discovered Through OpenAire

From a CARL and COAR:

Several Canadian research libraries are providing funding to ensure that the vast majority of DSpace repositories around the world can be discovered through OpenAIRE, an international database of open scholarly content.

Quality and comprehensive metadata are a critical requirement for building discovery and other services on top of distributed repository content. To that end, several regional repository networks including Europe, Latin America and Canada have agreed to adopt the OpenAIRE metadata guidelines – which define a common approach to assigning metadata elements.

In order to support the new OpenAIRE guidelines, repository platforms must change the way they expose their metadata. While new versions of repository platforms will support the guidelines, many institutions still use previous versions of the software, and are faced with non-compliance or undertaking challenging local development of their software.

Queen’s University Library along with several other Canadian university libraries are pleased to provide funding for the development of an extension to DSpace 5 & 6 that will support compliance with the OpenAIRE Guidelines for Literature Repository Managers v4. Given the widespread use of the DSpace platform, this will enable hundreds of repositories around the world to participate in network services such as OpenAIRE and LA Referencia.

This work is being undertaken as part of the collaboration between the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, COAR and OpenAIRE, with financial support for this development from the following Canadian libraries: Queen’s University, Université de Montréal, Université Laval, University of British Columbia, University of Saskatchewan, Vancouver Island University, and York University.

The technological implementation will be undertaken by 4Science, which is a Certified Partner of DSpace, contributor to COAR Next Generation Repository Expert Group, collaborator of OpenAIRE and ORCID, and longtime supporter of open source technologies, open standards and interoperability.

The release of the implementation and user documentation is expected by the end of February 2020.

Filed under: Academic Libraries, Funding, Libraries, News, Open Access