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  • Unfair publisher fees for deposit into repositories highlight the need for authors to exercise their rights

    Unfair publisher fees for deposit into repositories highlight the need for authors to exercise their rights

    Image: Adobe Stock Image Scientific knowledge is a public good Science and scholarship are about sharing and advancing knowledge, and many open access policies have been diligently designed in order to ensure that all their funded researchers are able to comply with them, even if they do not have the funds to pay to publish Read more

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  • How innovative new practices are helping transform scholarly publishing

    How innovative new practices are helping transform scholarly publishing

    Kathleen Shearer, COAR Executive Director In today’s fast-paced world where new discoveries emerge at an ever-increasing rate, delays of 12–24 months in accessing research articles – many of which are taxpayer-funded – are no longer acceptable. Furthermore, as public trust in research declines in some countries, it is crucial to adopt a more efficient and Read more

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  • Open repositories are being profoundly impacted by AI bots and other crawlers: Report from a COAR Survey

    Open repositories are being profoundly impacted by AI bots and other crawlers: Report from a COAR Survey

    Executive Summary Every day, multiple bots access the repository at all hours 24/7. We estimate performance degradation due to bot activity about once or twice a day, and at least once a week the system crashes entirely requiring an intervention – typically a service restart. Survey respondent There are a growing number of AI bots Read more

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  • Presentations from the COAR Annual Conference 2025

    Presentations from the COAR Annual Conference 2025

    Trends in Policy, Discovery, and Innovation The COAR Annual Conference 2025 took place in Tokyo, Japan on May 12-14, 2025. The conference was jointly organized by COAR, JPCOAR and the National Institute of Informatics (NII) and brought together international and Japanese participants to share experiences, identify priority activities across our communities, and contribute to the Read more

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  • Report from the COAR Annual Conference 2025

    Report from the COAR Annual Conference 2025

    All presentations are online and the recordings from the meeting will be made available in mid-June 2025. The COAR Conference took place in Tokyo, Japan on May 12-15, 2025 and was attended by approximately 140 people representing at least 23 different countries. The meeting was jointly organized by COAR, JPCOAR, and the National Institute of Read more

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  • The Expanding COAR Notify Ecosystem: Project Update

    The Expanding COAR Notify Ecosystem: Project Update

    May 5, 2025 The COAR Notify Project has passed the halfway point of the 4-year project funded by Arcadia. In the past 2.5 years, the COAR Notify team has made significant progress in terms of adoption of the COAR Notify Protocol, with several developments still ongoing and several new ones in the pipeline. This post Read more

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  • COAR welcomes new Executive Board 2025-2028

    COAR welcomes new Executive Board 2025-2028

    COAR is very pleased to announce the election of a new Executive Board 2025-2028. The election took place at the COAR Participants’ Meeting on April 3, 2025. The new members of the Board are: These board members, who represent a wide range of geographical areas, were voted in with overwhelming support from the COAR membership. Read more

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  • USRN Discovery Pilot: Outcomes and Next Steps

    USRN Discovery Pilot: Outcomes and Next Steps

    An interoperable network of repositories is an essential component of our national research infrastructure, offering rapid and open access to research outputs. They play a critical role in safeguarding research outputs and are typically housed and managed by long-lived universities and research institutions. In 2022, SPARC and COAR initiated the USRN to strengthen and increase Read more

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  • Action Plan for Open Repositories in Europe: IMPACT-REPO

    Action Plan for Open Repositories in Europe: IMPACT-REPO

    March 12, 2025 – Today, LIBER, OpenAIRE, SPARC Europe, and COAR are publishing a plan of action to strengthen and future-proof research repositories in Europe.  A robust repository network is key for safeguarding Europe’s research production and advancing scientific excellence in Europe. And while currently, Europe has one of the most well-developed networks globally with Read more

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  • COAR Activities Plan 2025

    COAR Activities Plan 2025

    COAR brings together individual repositories and repository networks in order to build capacity, align policies and practices, drive innovation, and act as a global voice for the repository community.  COAR members play a leadership role in shaping the future for all repositories COAR has an ambitious plan for 2025, with our activities falling under four Read more

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