On September 27 to 29 the Directive Council of La Referencia, the regional repository network from Latin America, met in Buenos Aires, Argentina. La Referencia was created five years ago and currently brings together nine national nodes and aggregates almost 1,5 million documents.The meeting, with representatives from Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, El Salvador, Colombia, Argentina and Costa Rica confirmed the broadening of the focus of La Referencia from open access to open science, discussed the ...

The 4th annual Chinese Institutional Repository Conference took place in Chongqing, China on September 21-22, 2016, with the theme of “Rich functions and extended roles for institutional repositories”. The conference was jointly organized by National Science Library, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and CIRG (Chinese institutional repository implementation group), and Chongqing University Library. It attracted over 330 registered participants, reflecting the growing interest in repositories in ...

Guest post by Kathleen Shearer, Executive Director, COAR“The reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated” (to paraphrase Mark Twain)Last week COAR published a response to an article written by Richard Poynder on September 22, 2016. Although some of Richard Poynder’s comments definitely reflect the current reality, he made a number of other somewhat questionable assertions, in particular that institutional repositories (IRs) have failed.Poynder's comments reflect a creeping narrative enter...

On April 12 & 13 this year's Annual Meeting and General Assembly of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) took place in Vienna/Austria. Through a diverse mix of conference sessions, round-table discussions and open dialogue, the meeting pushed attendees to examine the future of repositories and the challenges and opportunities for international collaboration.Day one had the theme “Next Generation Repositories”. The first presentation was from Herbert Van der Sompel, who built ...

Co-hosted by the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) on April 14-16, 2015, the conference “Connecting research results, bridging communities, opening scholarship” , held in Porto, offered a thought-provoking programme with dynamic speakers from around the world to discuss the opportunities and challenges for libraries in a world of open science and open content, provided a valuable opportunity for partic...