In 2013, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), along with the Association of American Universities (AAU) and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) launched the SHARE initiative—or Shared Access Research Ecosystem. Funded through grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), SHARE was conceived to network university-based digital repositories in order to facilitate public access to research.

From that initial collaboration among associations, SHARE transitioned into a partnership between ARL and the Center for Open Science (COS) to create a community open-source initiative to develop tools and services to connect related research outputs, allowing new kinds of scholarly discovery. In 2017–2019, the project was also supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to integrate digital humanities (DH) into the scholarly web. ARL wrapped up its involvement with SHARE with the conclusion of that project and the publication of a white paper on DH discovery.

After amassing a database of tens of millions of metadata records over several years, SHARE will be shutting down a portion of its harvesting operation in 2020 and the dataset is archived in CurateND (doi:10.7274/r0-0daz-j832), the University of Notre Dame’s institutional repository managed by Hesburgh Libraries. Examples of interacting with the data are also available on Github: https://github.com/ndlib-cds/share-samples. COS will be evaluating the future of SHARE as the index for searching across its popular OSF Preprints and OSF Registries platforms, in hopes of evolving the service to be cost-effective to operate and maintain to meet the constrained scope.

Read the full story published at arl.org.