CARL Releases Documentation to Support Canadian Repositories’ Participation in OpenAIRE

August 16, 2021. – Members of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL)’s Open Repositories Working Group (ORWG) have released a suite of resources designed to get Canadian repositories’ contents reflected in the OpenAIRE discovery service.

In January 2018, CARL entered into a collaboration with OpenAIRE as part of  the OpenAIRE Advance project. The ultimate aim of this collaboration is to provide a gateway to Canadian scholarly content. 

The ORWG undertook a pilot project in 2020-2021 through which several repositories have become compliant with OpenAIRE’s Literature Repository Guidelines v.4 and have had their contents successfully harvested into the OpenAIRE platform: the National Research Council (NRC)’s digital repositories, the Eprint repository at Concordia (Spectrum) and the DSpace repository at Queen’s University (QSpace). In addition, all Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR) metadata are now also compliant with OpenAIRE Data Repository Guidelines and are being harvested. A Canadian portal within OpenAIRE is currently available in beta version, and allows for narrowing of results according to Canadian federal funding agency.

Based on feedback from the pilot and discussions with OpenAIRE, the ORWG’s OpenAIRE Task Group has developed extensive documentation that includes a step-by-step decision tree, guidance for OpenAIRE metadata compliance, and a FAQ) to support the Canadian repository community in ensuring their repository contents are represented in OpenAIRE, either through direct implementation of the OpenAIRE Guidelines into their repository, or by having the metadata from their repository harvested via the Canada Research aggregator. The eight documents that make up this suite of documentation are now listed as part of the “CARL Collaboration with OpenAIRE” project pages on the CARL website. 

CARL wishes to recognize the tremendous contributions of the OpenAIRE Task Group members: project lead Pierre Lasou (Université Laval), Yoo Young Lee (University of Ottawa), Courtney Earl Matthews (Queen’s University), Danoosh Davoodi (University of Alberta), Jordan Hale (University of Waterloo), Lindsey MacCallum (Mount Saint Vincent University), Gabriela Mircea (McMaster University), Tomasz Neugebauer (Concordia University), Kathleen Shearer (COAR, CARL Research Associate), Andrea Szwajcer (University of Manitoba), Kelly Stathis (Portage Network), Michael Vandenburg (Queen’s University), and Mita Williams (University of Windsor). Thanks also for their contributions during the pilot phase to Sophie Roy, Liseanne Cadieux, Cyndie Found, and Marc Dion (National Research Council), and Eugene Barsky (University of British Columbia).

For any questions related to this project, please contact .