(27 Nov 2025) This report presents a brief overview of the socio-political landscape for scholarly communications and describes some of the major forces that could significantly impact the repository ecosystem in the coming years. The aim is to provide COAR members with a synopsis of current trends that may affect repositories as well as to inform the development of the next COAR Strategy to be published in December 2025.
The analysis was developed based on input from a survey of COAR members that took place in August/September 2025, a review of the literature and consultations with experts in the scholarly communications space, as well as feedback from the COAR Executive Board. COAR sincerely thanks everyone for their extremely valuable input in developing this document and in helping us to craft a more effective organizational strategy for the next three years.
As part of this analysis, we have identified several evolving and potentially volatile forces that are likely to have a significant impact on scholarly communications, open science, and repositories over the next three years. The report goes on to discuss the implications for repositories as a result of these forces.
Read the full report here.
