SHared Access Research Ecosystem (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE.edu

"When the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued its February 22, 2013, memorandum directing science agencies with more than $100 million per year of sponsored research funds to create public-access policies for research outputs (both publications and data),1 it enumerated the variety of public and private players in the complicated world of research and scholarly publishing. Recognition of that complex research and information ecosystem and an abiding commitment to public access are what gave the SHared Access Research Ecosystem, or SHARE—a coalition of higher education associations including the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of American Universities, and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities—its familiar acronym. SHARE is currently guided by a Steering Group, which consists of the association leaders, provosts, senior research officers, library directors, and CIOs and which is overseeing four diversely populated Working Groups representing libraries, technologists, standards bodies, publishing, and more. SHARE's central tenet is that policies expanding public access should provide an opportunity for higher education institutions—individually and collectively—to fulfill their missions to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge. Higher education is not the only institutional actor involved in disseminating and preserving knowledge; in fact, it shares this role with non-profit publishers, commercial publishers, and scholarly and scientific societies. However, research universities function in large part in the public sphere and thus measure their success according to the impact they have in communicating science to the public and not in generating revenue directly from their research output. SHARE envisions partnerships with these other entities wherein research universities and their libraries maintain independence and control over preservation and access to the research in which they have invested via their faculties, laboratories, students, libraries, technologies, and other forms of infrastructure. Through SHARE, the higher education community asserts the primacy of its continued mission in generating new knowledge as well as disseminating and preserving that knowledge for ongoing societal benefit. An ecosystem is, after all, a complex set of relationships among diverse organisms—in this case, funding agencies with millions of dollars to invest in research; scholars, the majority of whom are affiliated with research universities; scholarly societies, which publish the journals of their disciplines either independently or through relationships with commercial publishers; and research libraries, which have spent centuries providing access and preserving the scholarly record for current users and future generations. Extending the ecosystem metaphor, the OSTP memorandum was a call for system-wide sustainability: for agencies to design policies that make use of existing institutional and discipline-based digital repositories, many of which are based in research universities and their libraries and which recognize the central role of societies and publishers in the life of the researcher and in the dissemination of research. But the memorandum, applauded by higher education, was nevertheless a disturbance to an ecosystem already unstable due to a series of policy, economic, and technical changes to scholarship and scholarly communications. This disturbance will require adaptation by and transformation of the ecosystem's major species if they are to thrive ..."