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

[Sophia Jones <Sophia.Jones@nottingham.ac.uk>]

***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@sub.uni-goettingen.de

or Shigeki Sugita, sugita@lib.hokudai.ac.jp

****