***apologies for cross posting***

Press Release 

DRIVER Confederation Summit

On October 20th, the DRIVER II project will host an international
Confederation Summit at the Booktower in Ghent, home to DRIVER's Belgian
project partner, University Library Ghent. An assembly of international
strategic partners in the field of Open Access to scholarly
communication will convene in order to celebrate the achievements of the
DRIVER II project and to reflect on the uptake of DRIVER in national and
international repository communities that provide a head start into the
future of scientific repository infrastructure.  Within DRIVER II, one
of the objectives was to build an international Confederation to promote
greater visibility and application of research outputs through global
networks of Open Access digital repositories.  In a process of
consultation with the international repository community, the
Confederation has emerged, poised to support and coordinate global
collaborative efforts towards the provision and exchange of high-quality
Open Access data in an interoperable global knowledge infrastructure. 

The DRIVER Confederation Summit will serve also to launch the new
international organisation, COAR: the Confederation of Open Access
Repositories, observing the partnerships that mark the achievement of
this significant association of content providers, international
repository federations and affiliated organisations.  COAR aims to
support the expansion of open access through developing international,
interoperable standards; advocating for open access policies with
research funders and institutions; and working to improve deposit rates
at repositories.  Founding members of COAR are stakeholder organisations
from European counties as well as international members from Japan,
China, Canada and the United States.

Described by Subbiah Arunachalam, a protagonist of Open Access, as
'reaching the unreached', the extension of the vision of DRIVER from a
primarily European focus to serve the development of a global knowledge
infrastructure.  The success of DRIVER in achieving an unprecedented
level of interoperability between European repositories commands a wider
organisational infrastructure to link confederations of repositories
across continents around the globe in support of new models of scholarly
communication.  The vision of a global knowledge infrastructure is
enabled in the sharing of scalable information technologies and Open
Access models of information dissemination and data re-use.

COAR will be launched during Open Access Week 2009. Please contact Dr
Dale Peters ([log in to unmask], cc:
[log in to unmask]) to register your interest in becoming a
member of COAR.

For more information about the Confederation Summit, please contact
Karen Van Godtsenhoven at [log in to unmask]

DRIVER II is a project funded by the EC under FP7.





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