The federal government’s open access research mandate described in this Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memo is a big deal for U.S. institutions’ Offices of Research and a huge opportunity for libraries and their repositories. Recognizing the importance of this directive, the ARL, the AAU, and the APLU joined forces this summer to create SHARE, a committee dedicated to designing a response to the mandate and facilitating collaboration between institutions. The initial SHARE proposal discussed creating a U.S. federated repository composed of government-funded research from individual repositories.
Given the potential impact of this government directive, libraries are smartly trying to anticipate how they might respond to serve the needs of their faculty and institutions. There are many discussions currently circulating within the U.S. Digital Commons community on how best to plan for this new scholarly communications environment.
Based on ongoing conversations with people knowledgeable about SHARE, we’d like offer a perspective of what might come next. We’ve also formed some recommendations for the library community.
The steering committee announced at the ARL Fall Forum on October 10th that it is still working on a project roadmap. To us this means that the first phase of SHARE may look significantly different than what was described in the initial SHARE proposal. Richard Luce, Co-Chair of the steering committee for SHARE, gave an indication of a possible new starting point for SHARE when he said, and we paraphrase, “The big opportunity (for SHARE) isn’t just pointing to the final research or the data but to optimize the entire workflow.” We see this exploration into workflows as a very promising avenue and we hope that the committee continues moving in this direction. Facilitating and tracking individual compliance is an essential and distinct role that universities are in a unique position to fill.
So what can U.S. academic libraries do to prepare? Since the plans for SHARE are still in development, creating a library strategy around SHARE could potentially lead to a lot of wasted effort. Our advice is to focus on anticipating the impact of the OSTP memo instead. At the ARL Fall Forum Karla Strieb, Associate Director for Collections at Ohio State University, gave an excellent presentation where she shared what her team is doing to prepare. Her plan focuses on learning everything she can about grant-funding and grant-funding workflows on campus to help identify the departments and faculty members she will need to engage. Unfortunately, the presentation isn’t live yet, so we can’t include a link to it here; however, we’d be happy to send along a copy when it’s made available. Feel free to shoot us an email at outreach@bepress.com and let us know if you’re interested.
Finally, we would like to reiterate that bepress remains in an excellent position to support Digital Commons institutions interested in participating in this important initiative. We will continue to actively engage with the SHARE steering committee and update you on progress as it is made.
