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Higher Ed Associations Form Joint Steering Group to Build Federated System for Publicly Funded Research

image © Niklas Wikström

The Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Association of American Universities (AAU), and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) today announced the formation of a joint steering group to advance a proposed network of digital repositories at universities, libraries, and other research institutions across the US that will provide long-term public access to federally funded research articles and data.

The steering group will oversee a feasibility study, guide policy, and explore governance structures necessary for prototyping and implementing the network. This repository network, the SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE), is being developed as one response to a White House directive instructing federal funding agencies to make the results of research they fund available to the public.

The SHARE Steering Group will be chaired by Rick Luce, associate vice president for research and dean of university libraries at University of Oklahoma, and Tyler Walters, dean of university libraries at Virginia Tech. Other members of the steering group include: Richard McCarty, provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs, Vanderbilt University; MacKenzie Smith, university librarian, University of California, Davis; Brad Wheeler, vice president for information technology and CIO, Indiana University; and Caroline Whitacre, vice president for research, Ohio State University. Additionally, Joyce Backus, associate director for library operations at the National Library of Medicine where PubMed Central resides, will serve as a National Institutes of Health liaison to the SHARE Steering Group.

For more information on SHARE, please see https://www.arl.org/share. Send comments or questions about the SHARE proposal to share@arl.org.

Please direct press inquiries and other questions about this release to Elliott Shore, ARL executive director, elliott@arl.org; John C. Vaughn, AAU executive vice president, john.vaughn@aau.edu; or R. Michael Tanner, APLU chief academic officer and vice president, mtanner@aplu.org.


The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) is a nonprofit organization of 125 research libraries in the US and Canada. Its mission is to influence the changing environment of scholarly communication and the public policies that affect research libraries and the diverse communities they serve. ARL pursues this mission by advancing the goals of its member research libraries, providing leadership in public and information policy to the scholarly and higher education communities, fostering the exchange of ideas and expertise, facilitating the emergence of new roles for research libraries, and shaping a future environment that leverages its interests with those of allied organizations. ARL is on the web at https://www.arl.org/.

The Association of American Universities (AAU) is a nonprofit association of 60 US and two Canadian preeminent public and private research universities. Founded in 1900, AAU focuses on national and institutional issues that are important to research-intensive universities, including funding for research, research and education policy, and graduate and undergraduate education. AAU is on the web at http://www.aau.edu/.

The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) is a research, policy, and advocacy organization representing 218 public research universities, land-grant institutions, state university systems, and related organizations. Founded in 1887, APLU is the nation’s oldest higher education association with member institutions in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and four US territories. Annually, member campuses enroll more than 3.8 million undergraduates and 1.2 million graduate students, award over 1 million degrees, employ nearly 1 million faculty and staff, and conduct more than $37 billion in university-based research. APLU is on the web at http://www.aplu.org/.

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