Jeffrey Spies, SHARE’s co-director and the original architect of both SHARE and the Open Science Framework (OSF), will be leading a redesign of SHARE’s core technology over the coming months as an independent partner. Joining Jeff in this effort will be Rick Johnson, a program director at the University of Notre Dame Hesburgh Libraries, visiting program officer for SHARE at the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), and longstanding contributor to other open-source community development efforts, such as Samvera. The next phase of the project—SHARE v3—will make SHARE’s metadata-harvesting process more conducive to community contribution, improve the metadata-editing pipeline for more efficient human intervention, and restructure the database to more readily capture relationships among works, creators, and affiliations. In addition, this phase will make institutional hosting of SHARE technology more accessible.
In this phase, the SHARE team will actively pursue code contributions from the community, strategic partnerships with allied projects in open scholarship, and institutional participation. With open community calls and development sprints, the SHARE team will provide the community a mechanism to prioritize and contribute features and improvements. Analysis, prototyping, and partnership development are already underway.
The increased focus on institutions and community contribution marks an important milestone for SHARE. Having been incubated by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and its higher education counterparts in the Association of American Universities and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities in 2013, SHARE’s core tools and technologies were built by the Center for Open Science (COS) in collaboration with ARL. SHARE v2 was completed in the summer of 2016 at the same time that COS launched OSF Preprints, now hosting almost 20 different discipline- and language-based preprint services. SHARE, already a metadata aggregator for existing preprint services such as RePEc and arXiv, was easily deployed to power the most comprehensive search of preprints across all disciplines. COS will continue to maintain SHARE v2 as OSF Preprint search.
SHARE’s broader mission, rooted in the research library community, is to make research widely accessible, discoverable, and reusable by reflecting the entirety of the research life cycle in the SHARE data set. The SHARE application programming interface (API) provides access to more than 150 repositories of data, software, and other contextual materials that accompany formal publications. SHARE v3’s redesign will be driven by the research-affiliation user story: what research output can I associate with my institution; and the funder user story: what research is associated with a particular funding source. Because of their complexity, these use cases can only be realized through a decentralized, community-based approach to local data curation (and wrangling) on one hand, and a scalable, reusable, unified code base on the other. The SHARE team is actively pursuing collaboration with others involved in open-source research analytics and welcomes partners and stakeholders who want to drive development of an open-source, open-platform approach to institutional-research stewardship.
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