SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE)

Research universities are long-lived and are mission-driven to generate, make accessible, and preserve over time new knowledge and understanding. Research universities collectively have the assets needed for a national solution for enhanced public access to federally funded research output. As the principal producers of the resources that are to be made publicly available under the new White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)1 memorandum, and that are critical to the continuing success of higher education in the United States, universities have invested in the infrastructure, tools, and services necessary to provide effective and efficient access to their research and scholarship. The new White House directive provides a compelling reason to integrate higher education’s investments to date into a system of cross-institutional digital repositories that will be known as SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE). SHARE envisions that universities will collaborate with the Federal Government and others to host cross-institutional digital repositories of public access research publications that meet federal requirements for public availability and preservation. Universities already own and operate key pieces of the infrastructure, including digital institutional repositories, Internet2, Digital Preservation Network (DPN)2, and more.These current capacities and capabilities will naturally be extended over time. Universities have also invested in recent years in working with Principal Investigators and other campus partners on developing digital data management plans to comply with agency requirements. There are also compelling business interests for higher education investments in this system. The current publishing structure for research and scholarly literature effectively manages peer review and editing, but limits its usefulness by restricting access to the breadth and depth of the literature. Limited access, particularly to the research that results from federal funding, constrains new academic programs, such as those that

seek to engage in computational analysis of the research corpus and more. In this business context, an important goal of both SHARE and the Federal Government is toensure that we maximize the value of research funding. SHARE fully embodies the spirit of the OSTP directive of February 22, 2013, and will efficiently and effectively provide all functionalities that the directive envisions to the public, commercial, and scientific communities ..."