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SHARE Releases Notification System Project Plan

computer keyboard with a
image © Niklas Wikström

The SHared Access Research Ecosystem (SHARE)—a joint initiative of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Association of American Universities (AAU), and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU)—released on February 6, 2014, the SHARE Notification System Project Plan (PDF). The plan details the first in a series of activities to be undertaken by SHARE to ensure that scholarly research outputs are discovered and built upon in a manner that facilitates and accelerates the research process. The SHARE notification system is consistent with higher education’s ongoing mission to encourage community-driven solutions that increase public access to research and maximize knowledge creation.

Funding agencies, sponsored research offices at universities, institutional and disciplinary repositories, and other interested parties have found it difficult to keep abreast of the release of publications, datasets, and other results of scholarly research. Across the disciplines, principal investigators and other scholars do not have any single, structured way to report on these releases in a timely and comprehensive manner. The SHARE Notification System is a higher education–based initiative to strengthen efforts to identify, discover, and track research outputs.

The SHARE Notification System Project Plan focuses on the process by which this system will be developed. This process will also make it possible for SHARE to develop the long-term vision of a robust repository ecosystem that includes not just the notification system, but also the following:

  • A distributed registry layer that can accommodate not just publications but also research data
  • A discovery layer to help interested parties find research outputs across repositories
  • A content aggregation layer that moves beyond curation and discovery to facilitate data and text mining of large corpora of content, as well as other community-driven value-added services

SHARE leadership anticipates that these three layers will be discussed, refined, and pursued in rough concert with the notification system planning. The precise timing and ordering of their development will be determined through community dialogue with SHARE working groups and other key stakeholders.

For more information about the project, visit the SHARE webpage and follow SHARE on Twitter and Facebook.


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 219 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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