Elliot Shore, executive director, Association of Research Libraries

1. SHARE:
Shared Access Research
Ecosystem
Elliott Shore

2. A talk in five parts
1. Quick introduction to SHARE
2. A surfeit of individual projects
3. An historical interlude
4. Searching for Coherence
5. Back to SHARE

3. 1. Introducing SHARE
SHARE is a higher education and research community
initiative to advance the preservation of, access to, and
reuse of research outputs.

4. SHARE will develop solutions that address the compelling
interest shared by researchers, libraries, universities,
funding agencies, and other key stakeholders to maximize
research impact, today and in the future.

5. SHARE aims to make the inventory of research assets
more discoverable and more accessible and to enable the
research community to build upon these assets in creative
and productive ways.

6. SHARE Partnership

7. Center for Open Science
SHARE Development Partner

8. Building open scholarship infrastructure
• Open Science Framework
• Reproducibility Projects
• Badges for Open Practices
centerforopenscience.org
Center for Open Science

9. What Is The Goal of SHARE?
– Creating robust ecosystem of repositories
– Leveraging existing research environment
– Capturing and exposing research outputs
– Enabling and enhancing discovery, access,
reuse, preservation

10. Current Situation
• Difficulty in keeping abreast of release of
publications, datasets, other research outputs
• No single, structured way to report research
output releases in timely and ubiquitous manner
• Emphasis on publications = data silos, data
version control morass, incomplete
contextualization
2. A surfeit of individual projects

12. Here is a subset of another space
That also cries out for coherence

13. 3. An historical interlude

14. Continuities: Legacy Thinking
• The library is the institution that bears the
deepest marks of the thinking of the last century
and a half.
• It was a time when many thought that the
increasingly complex world that was emerging in
the mid-to-late 19th century could be managed
through reducing each problem to discrete parts
and tasks.
• The legacy of 19th century thinking can perhaps
be seen most clearly our organizational
structures.

15. Change: Digital Disruption
• The penetration of the dynamic, changeable
nature of digital, Web-based, linked information
technologies to universities and to research
libraries has shown the fissures and exposed the
assumptions in some of the fixed structures into
which we have organized ourselves and how we
think about our work.
• Then: Discrete Now: Fluid
• Then: Contained Now: Ubiquitous
• Then: One profession Now: Many professions
• Then: Hierarchal and rigid Now: Collaborative

16. Finding a Middle Ground
• Old ways of thinking effect how we tackle
new problems.
• Can we weigh our older ideas of order
against the new realities we face?
• Can we get beyond binary oppositions:
– centralization versus decentralization
– control versus openness
– fixed versus shifting categories

17. 4. Searching for Coherence
“The inherited norms, customs, traditions,
and institutions that have structured
research and teaching now need to be
constructively challenged, redefined, and
subsequently reassembled. The next two
decades could witness an extraordinary
fluorescence of activity among universities
and colleges focused on repositioning,
consolidation, and convergence.”
- Charles Henry, “Higher Ground.”

18. The Opportunities
• We are a long way down the path of
experimentation.
• We have many of the parts of the puzzle
in our hands.
• We have sympathetic funders.
• We have a need to reduce the cost of
higher education.
• We have a tradition of cooperation and
collaboration.

19. How Coherence at Scale could work
Discovery Curation
Access and
Reuse
Preservation
Instead of every institution recreating the cycle alone…
… can we connect existing large-scale digital initiatives into a
coherent system?

20. The Concerns
• We take pride in our own projects and want to see them
grow and prosper, tend them, and protect them.
• We compete with one another for funding these projects –
in the US its called the $20,000 person – securing each
individual project rather than the whole field.
• We are subject to our own local issues which usually trump
the larger good.
• We are both goaded on by commercial interests and often
take cheaper immediate measures rather than looking
towards long-term solutions.
• Crisis moments often lead to institutional rather than
collective decision-making processes.

21. 5. Back to SHARE

23. Notification Service

24. Research Release Events (Source)

25. Research Release Events (Consumer)

26. Registry

27. Registry and Discovery

28. Who Benefits?
Researchers
Universities
Funding Agencies
Industry
General Public

29. SHARE and Other Researcher Initiatives
CHORUS
ORCID
CrossRef/FundRef
International

30. What about …
Data?
Author rights?
Institutional rights?
Text- and data-mining?
Sharing? Reuse?
Interoperability?

31. Final Thoughts
• “The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been
hidden by the answers.” James Baldwin
• “…collaboration, diversity, the exchange of ideas, and building on
other people's achievements are at the heart of the creative
process. An education that focuses only on the individual in
isolation is bound to frustrate some of those possibilities.” Sir Ken
Robinson

32. Web: www.arl.org/share
E-mail: share@arl.org
Twitter: @SHARE_research
Knowledge Base:
bit.ly/TTE6jt

33. Questions?