[InetBib] Digital Repository Federation (Japan) and DRIVER sign Memorandum of Understanding

[Sophia Jones <Sophia.Jones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

***Apologies for cross posting***

Press Release

Digital Repository Federation (Japan) and DRIVER sign Memorandum of
Understanding

3 December 2008



Sapporo, Japan and Goettingen, Germany - As part of the SPARC Digital
Repositories Meeting 2008 held in Baltimore Maryland from 17-18 November
2008, DRF (Japan) and DRIVER have agreed to work closely together on
promoting federated repository infrastructures, signing a Memorandum of
Understanding to take this collaboration forward.

DRIVER is a joint initiative of European stakeholders, co-financed by
the European Commission, setting up a technical infrastructure for
digital repositories and facilitating the building of an umbrella
organisation for digital repositories. DRIVER relies on research
libraries for the sustainable operation of repositories and provision of
high quality content through digital repositories.

Digital Repository Federation (DRF) is a federation consisting of 86
universities and research institutes which aims to promote Open Access
and Institutional Repository development in Japan. Under the auspices of
the National Institute of Informatics (NII), Tokyo, DRF is a
collaborative program for institutional repositories, based on one of
the research and development projects of the national framework of Cyber
Science Infrastructure (CSI).

DRF and DRIVER share the vision that the Open Access movement in Europe
and in Japan contribute to better scholarly communication in the world;
and that each should contribute actively and cooperatively to a global,
interoperable, trusted and long-term data and service infrastructure
based on Open Access digital repositories.

Collaboration between DRF (Japan) and DRIVER is framed by their joint
support for an Open Access model for repositories in research and higher
education institutions. They present a common strategy to enable
research libraries - pressed to improve scholarly communication by
establishing digital repositories - to expose institutional research
outputs to the world. Networks of individual repositories and
overarching information services for aggregation, retrieval, sharing and
re-use are being built on the basis of institutional, national and
regional location, or by subject areas.

Norbert Lossau, Scientific Technical Co-ordinator of DRIVER, said 'The
collaboration between the organizational structures of both DRIVER and
DRF forms the nucleus of federated repository development of a global,
interoperable, trusted and long-term repository infrastructure. We are
very pleased to formalize our relationship by signing this Memorandum of
Understanding.'

Masaaki Hemmi, the Director of DRF, said 'No doubt the coalition of DRF
and DRIVER will lead to the best and widest dissemination of joint
enterprises between researchers, who turn out scholarly fruits, and
librarians, who manage digital repositories in every corner of the
world. Nothing pleases me more than the start of our collaborative
activities.'

For more information, contact: Dale Peters,
petersd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 

or Shigeki Sugita, sugita@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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