Confederation of Open Access Libraries (COAR)
Background: COAR is an international association with over 160 members and partners from around the world representing libraries, universities, research institutions, government funders and others.
Mission: It brings together individual repositories and repository networks to advance innovation, strengthen practices, and act as a global voice for the repository community.
Community over Commercialization:
“There are some things that should not be commercialized—and scholarly communication infrastructures are one of them. The benefits of community control outweigh any potential downsides. At COAR, we’re working to develop a global, community-based repository network, based at universities, libraries, and research agencies from across the world, to ensure that our collective research knowledge is both open and managed by long-lived and trusted institutions.”
“I think there's a realization in the community that there are limitations in terms of how far we can get and how equitable the system will be if we continue to rely mainly on commercial entities to publish research outputs. That said, a lot of recent policies favor the repository route, rather than pay-to-publish. Still, there's definitely a long way to go to replace what they're doing with a predominantly non-commercial system.”
“In the open access world, we have seen that a certain level of commercialization and ownership over content is detrimental to the scholarly community at large and to the public. So in that sense, we feel the commercialization of scholarly communications has not been good for the broader community.”
“At COAR, we're very much about community. We are a membership association and only not-for-profit organizations can join. Our governance is completely community driven and that's very important to us. The raison d'etre of commercial entities is often in direct conflict with the goals and objectives in our communities.”
“The writing has been on the wall for the past 20 years. We've gone from subscription-based access now to the transition towards open access, with predominantly a pay to publish model. The prevailing strategy 10 years ago was to flip commercial publishers towards open access, but the outcome of that has just been creating barriers to publishing, rather than barriers to access.
“The ultimate goal is that all of this content that is being created through research is able to be reused— including for use by industry and commercial organizations. So, in the end, there are benefits for private industry in a widely open access model based at not-for-profit and government-based institutions.”
-Kathleen Shearer, Executive Director, COAR