DRIVER: building a sustainable infrastructure for global repositories

DRIVER is a bold vision. The project represents the vision of worldwide networks of scientific data repositories and aims to achieve a global infrastructure supporting the scholarly communication of the future. The primary objective of DRIVER is to establish a flexible, robust, and scalable infrastructure for all European and world-wide digital repositories, managing scientific information in an Open Access model increasingly demanded by researchers, funding organisations and other stakeholders. It continues to expand its content base with high quality research output, including textual research papers, data sets and other scholarly publications. The recent D-NET v1.0 open source software release forms the basis of this distributed service-oriented architecture that enables enhanced interoperability of data and service-providers, with functionality ranging from search, recommendation, collections, profiling to innovative tools for repository managers. By building a robust network of content providers, enhanced with the set of services and software tools that DRIVER offers, the DRIVER infrastructure also enables further collaboration to domain specific research communities in a co-ordinated network of repositories from a growing number of institutional repositories, from national research institutions and data aggregators . Exciting new developments will see the extension of the infrastructure to global research communities in China, India, Africa and Latin America, deploying a vigorous awareness and advocacy programme. The DRIVER Confederation offers a support service for repository managers, a dynamic set of guidelines aimed at data interoperability, and the strategic support for new forms of scholarly communication. This paper will address DRIVER’s response to the global information environment, in concepts of scientific and technical collaboration that currently both challenge repository managers , and promise a future to open access publication through the growing international repository network. These issues are addressed in terms of recent technical developments , but include also strategic issues of policy development , improved services and additional functionality offered to the scholarly community that point to the achievement of the ultimate goal of a global and interactive representation of human knowledge.