(10 Jul 2025) On July 8, 2025, COAR officially launched the COAR International Repository Directory (IRD). The IRD will act as an authoritative source of information about repositories, providing the community with an accurate and timely record of the current repository landscape. This is more important than ever now that many countries are moving rapidly to widespread open science and the development of value added services based on open content in repositories.
The difference between the COAR IRD and other registries / directories is that it is community curated. Rather than relying on a centralised staff based at the directory to update records, the responsibility for curation of the IRD is distributed to responsible organisations (ROs). These organisations, in many cases – national entities – typically have a vested interest in maintaining up-to-date information about repositories within their purview. This approach, we believe, will address the issue of out of date and obsolete records, which have plagued many of the directories in the scholarly communications landscape.
July 8 was a soft launch at which COAR provided a demo of the IRD to COAR members. However, there is still much work to be done. In the next six months, COAR will start on-boarding responsible organisations to curate the records within their purview. In addition, we will use the rest of 2025 to:
Improve the interface and navigation based on feedback from the community
- Undertake some automated testing
- Develop documentation and FAQs to support the community
- Form an Advisory Group with several representatives from ROs
- Track resourcing requirements for COAR to manage the IRD on an ongoing basis
