End of DRIVER, beginning of COAR

As our current Committee Secretary, Mary Robinson posted to our list with her other hat on about the press release about COAR on the DRIVER website(http://www.driver-support.eu/newsevents.php?item=nCOAR4 ) UKCoRR members will have noticed that the European DRIVER project is coming to an end and the Confedoration of Open Access Repositories has been established.

DRIVER's activities were largely twofold:
1) Providing a focus for the OA community
2) Technical developments to help the community to share their content.
... And the DRIVER guidelines lines for Repository Managers and Administrators which focus on how to expose digital scientific resources using OAI-PMH and Dublin Core Metadata, are really very useful. The DRIVER Guidelines can be accessed at: http://www.driver-support.eu/managers.html

As COAR is likely to establish membership through the payment of a fee, and as UKCoRR is not funded, we are not likely to be very closely involved with their work, but the JISC have joined and UKCoRR and the JISC can and do work closely together through the committee members' activities and through collaboration with the Repositories Support Project who have sponsored much of our activity and through contact when issues arise. JISC colleagues have said that they think it is important to work with/through UKCoRR to reach repository managers.

One thing to note here is that the community which DRIVER was serving, and which COAR will serve, is slightly different than that which UKCoRR serves: obviously there is the wider, European scale. But also there is the fact that COAR is about open access repositories and the open access community more broadly so it is inclusive of learning objects and other types of material. Meanwhile, UKCoRR is for research repositories, which might or might not contain open access materials!

I hope that helps to make sense of the repositories/OA landscape a little further!