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Panel

Repository Reimagined: The Impact Repo Project

16 September 2025| 16:15
81/R-003A - Science Gateway Auditorium A

Moderator

Kathleen Shearer

COAR
Kathleen Shearer is the Executive Director of COAR. COAR is an international association with over 130 members and partners from around the world representing libraries, universities, research institutions, government funders and others. COAR brings together individual repositories and repository networks in order to build capacity, align policies and practices, and act as a global voice for the repository community. Shearer is a prominent figure in open access, open science, scholarly communications, and research data management for over 20 years. For the past 15 years, she has worked through COAR to build a truly global coalition of repositories and repository networks, ensuring that repositories are recognized as critical infrastructure for open science in national and continental policies; and that repositories innovate and adopt good practices. Based in Montreal, Canada, she actively contributes to numerous other organizations working to advance open science at a global scale including the Research Data Alliance, UNESCO Open Science Working Groups as well as numerous regional organizations such as LIBSENSE Africa, SPARC and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries. One of her major achievements has been leading COAR’s Next Generation Repositories and the COAR Notify initiatives, which have set new standards and practices to enhance repositories’ functionality to meet the needs of the open science in the future, including repositories playing a more prominent role in the diamond OA ecosystem via the “Publish, Review, Curate” model of scholarly publishing.

Repositories at the Heart of Open Science and AI Innovation

Open Science needs trusted, visible, and inclusive research outputs—and repositories are key. This panel showcases the IMPACT-REPO Action Plan and highlights innovative repository services that boost research impact, build trust, and support AI-driven discovery. Join us to explore how Europe’s repositories are evolving from access points to strategic engines of open science.

There is a global consensus that open science will make research more transparent and inclusive, accelerating the advancement of knowledge. The vision of open science depends on a robust network of well-functioning repositories that not only collect, preserve, and provide access to millions of valuable research outputs but also serve as critical institutional assets. In an era where AI is reshaping research and knowledge discovery, repositories play a key strategic role as curated collections of an institution’s intellectual production, ensuring visibility, integrity, and trustworthiness of research outputs.

In March 2025, LIBER, OpenAIRE, SPARC Europe, and COAR launched IMPACT-REPO, a joint plan to promote the vital position of open access repositories in Europe’s research landscape. The plan outlines four key dimensions in which repositories contribute—boosting research impact, fostering inclusiveness, building trust, and supporting innovation.

The Action Plan illustrates the key contributions of repositories in open science and presents four compelling narratives that articulate
the growing strategic value of repositories in Europe.

This panel session will present several case studies of repositories that are offering new and innovative services- such as Publish Review Curate, cost transparency, and artificial intelligence - and are driving innovation in the open science landscape.

Panelists

Eloy Rodrigues

Director
Eloy Rodrigues is the Director of the University of Minho Libraries. Eloy has been working on repositories, Open Access and Open Science for almost two decades, having established University of Minho institutional repository in 2003, and coordinating the UMinho team which works on RCAAP (Portugal Open Access Science Repositories) since 2008. At international level he has being working on several EU funded projects (like OpenAIRE and FOSTER) related with Open Access and Open Science and is member of the European University Association Expert Group on Open Science. Eloy was the Chair of the Executive Board of COAR, the Confederation of Open Access Repositories from 2015 to 2021. Eloy is currently member of the Executive Board of OpenAIRE and one of co-PIs of the Notify Project.

Nathalie Fargier

Director
Nathalie Fargier has directed the Center for Direct Scientific Communication (CCSD) in Lyon since 2020. With 25 years of experience in higher education and research, including 13 years in leadership roles focused on open infrastructures, she is a dedicated advocate for scientific knowledge. At CCSD, she oversees HAL+, an open science infrastructure comprising HAL (France’s national open repository), Episciences (an overlay journal platform), and SciencesConf (a scientific event management tool). She also leads HALiance, promoting links between publications, datasets, and software to enhance the research ecosystem. Previously, she co-founded Persée and is active in several open science initiatives, including COAR, EOSC, and OpenAIRE.

Nicola Tarocco

Product Manager
Nicola works at CERN in the IT Department as the Product Manager for InvenioRDM, an open-source digital repository technology that powers numerous repositories worldwide, including Zenodo. He also oversees the CERN Institutional Repository. His expertise and interests focus on Open Science, FAIR principles, and long-term digital preservation.