Open and Shut?: Interview with Kathleen Shearer, Executive Director of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories

Use the link to access the interview.  An excerpt from the introduction reads as follows: "In October 1999 a group of people met in New Mexico to discuss ways in which the growing number of 'eprint archives' could co-operate.  Dubbed the Santa Fe Convention, the meeting was a response to a new trend: researchers had begun to create subject-based electronic archives so that they could share their research papers with one another over the Internet. Early examples werearXiv, CogPrints and RePEc ...  With this end in mind it was decided to launch the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) and to develop a new machine-based protocol for sharing metadata. This would enable third party providers to harvest the metadata in scholarly archives and build new services on top of them. Critically, by aggregating the metadata these services would be able to provide a single search interface to enable scholars interrogate the complete universe of eprint archives as if a single archive. Thus was born the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). An early example of a metadata harvester was OAIster ... Today eprint archives are more commonly known as open access repositories, and while OAI-PMH remains the standard for exposing repository metadata, the nature, scope and function of scholarly archives has broadened somewhat. As well as subject repositories like arXiv and PubMed Central, for instance, there are now thousands of institutional repositories. Importantly, these repositories have become the primary mechanism for providing green open access — i.e. making publicly-funded research papers freely available on the Internet. Currently OpenDOAR lists over 3,600 OA repositories ... Fifteen years later, however, the task embarked upon at Santa Fe still remains a work in progress ... Explaining the decision to prioritise gold OA, Finch argued that repositories had failed to deliver on their promise ... We should not doubt that huge challenges remain in getting content into repositories. However, the whys and wherefores of this have been well rehearsed elsewhere, so we won’t dwell on them here ... Instead, let’s consider the current state of the repository infrastructure, particularly with regard to interoperability and discoverability. Why, for instance, do many repositories not expose adequate metadata?  Why do they sometimes provide just the metadata and not the full text? When will the sophisticated search functionality that researchers need become standard in repositories? Will it? And what new developments might help here? More generally, what does the future hold for the OA repository? ...  Who better to put these questions to than Kathleen Shearer, Executive Director of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR)? Launched in October 2009,COAR’s mission is to 'enhance the visibility and application of research outputs through a global network of open access digital repositories' and its membership currently includes over 100 institutions from around the world ..."