“The UK’s Joint Infor­ma­tion Sys­tems Com­mit­tee (JISC) has become a found­ing mem­ber of the Con­fed­er­a­tion of Open Access Repos­i­to­ries (COAR). COAR is an inter­na­tional not-for-profit asso­ci­a­tion that aims to pro­mote greater vis­i­bil­ity and appli­ca­tion of research out­puts through global net­works of Open Access (OA) dig­i­tal repositories.

Inspired from the Euro­pean DRIVER repos­i­to­ries project, which helps to enhance repos­i­tory devel­op­ment, COAR takes this vision to an inter­na­tional scale. Found­ing mem­bers of the Con­fed­er­a­tion include mem­bers from North Amer­ica, China, Japan and Europe. Join­ing COAR at the early stage of its devel­op­ment means mem­bers will be able to con­tribute to shap­ing the organisation’s objec­tives which will look at inter­op­er­abil­ity, rais­ing aware­ness and pro­mot­ing OA repos­i­to­ries, sup­port­ing the repos­i­tory com­mu­nity and work­ing with part­ners in closely related fields such as research man­age­ment and publishing.

Open Access repos­i­to­ries seek to offer researchers and uni­ver­si­ties the chance to sig­nif­i­cantly increase the impact of their research out­puts, with the poten­tial for sig­nif­i­cant ben­e­fits for UK higher edu­ca­tion and the econ­omy and soci­ety more widely. The aim of COAR is to enhance and progress the pro­vi­sion, vis­i­bil­ity and appli­ca­tion of research out­puts through global net­works of Open Access repos­i­to­ries.”