(Jun 2026) Scholarly communication is at a crossroads. The pressures bearing down on the global knowledge commons are converging at once. Scholarly infrastructure has become dangerously concentrated in the hands of a small number of commercial publishers and foreign-controlled platforms, leaving institutions and nations exposed to disruptions they cannot control. At the same time, the integrity of the scientific record is under acute strain, as AI-generated fabrications, paper mills, and reproducibility failures erode the trust on which science depends. Discovery systems remain systematically biased toward English, rendering the vast majority of the world’s research invisible. And public trust in information is fragile, at precisely the moment when citizens most need reliable access to evidence.
Repositories address all of these challenges – simultaneously. They are locally governed and hosted, open by design, internationally connected, and built on interoperability standards that allow them to serve researchers, policymakers, clinicians, and communities across every region and language. They maintain provenance, support version control, and provide the transparent, accountable infrastructure and can play in important role in the long term preservation of our valuable research outputs.
To highlight the critical importance of repositories, COAR is publishing a “Narrative Series”. The series provides several compelling, evidence-based portrayals that, taken together, build a powerful case for repositories as essential infrastructure for scholarly communications and the global knowledge commons.
- The untapped public value of open access repositories
- Safeguarding digital sovereignty through local stewardship and preservation
- Repositories unlock the potential of multilingual scholarship
- The role of repositories in maintaining research integrity
Three more narratives will be published in the coming months and will be posted here as they become available.
Read more here.
