Share

Abstract

Among the many compelling reasons and motivations to make scholarship more open and more accessible to more people, two in particular are gaining ground across the academy: 1) sharing research findings faster through disciplinebased preprint services, and 2) elevating contextual research objects such as code, software, and data to first-class research objects worthy of independent review and recognition. SHARE—a partnership between the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Center for Open Science (COS) to maximize research impact by making research widely accessible, discoverable, and reusable—is already supporting, or is poised to support, these developments in scholarly output. SHARE is a technology platform that aggregates free, open metadata about scholarship across the research life cycle (including proposals, registrations, data, publications, and more) from more than 125 sources, and is steadily adding more metadata providers. SHARE is disciplineagnostic in schema and in type of metadata source. With an application programming interface (API) and open metadata, SHARE can power or feed discovery services for new and emerging forms of scholarly expression in support of their exposure, recognition, and reuse. One such example is a new preprint repository network hosted by COS. As more scholars embrace digital tools and complete their research openly and transparently, disparate digital repositories and platforms are proliferating. By networking these platforms at the metadata level for discovery, SHARE is also becoming a community asset, through which metadata are shared and improved at scale, with a combination of automated intervention and expert human intervention. Although SHARE is co-led by ARL, a membership organization, any organization or repository can participate in providing and consuming data from SHARE. Expanding the impact, openness, and accessibility of scholarship is SHARE’s mission and endgame. Funding agencies and national governments are increasingly requiring openness in recognition of the scientific advances made possible through collaboration, the resource efficiencies of disclosing results and data on a faster basis, and the economic contributions of private sector innovation using open data. From the perspective of scholars of any discipline, sharing workflow components openly means finding collaborators early in the research process. Finding and reusing a tool, algorithm, or piece of code from another project can be time-saving, enabling researchers to concentrate their efforts on their own unique contributions and domain expertise.