DRIVER: Building a Sustainable Infrastructure of European Scientific Repositories

The acronym DRIVER stands for “Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research”. Ten partners from eight countries have entered into an international partnership, to connect and network as a first step more than 50 physically distributed institutional repositories to one, large-scale, virtual Knowledge Base of European research. Universities and research organisations around the world currently build repositories, whose overall number is estimated to exceed 600 by far. As the academic information landscape is already highly fragmented, DRIVER is the trans-national catalyst to overcome local, isolated efforts and to stop fragmentation by offering one harmonised, virtual knowledge resource. DRIVER currently builds a production quality test-bed to assist the development of a knowledge infrastructure across Europe. DRIVER as a project, funded by the “Research Infrastructure” unit of the European Commission, is also preparing for the future expansion and upgrade of the Digital Repository infrastructure across Europe. Ultimately repositories from all European countries should be included, following a set of pragmatic guidelines and committed to trans-national collaboration. DRIVER is also seeking early collaboration with international repository providers from other continents, including the United States, Australia and Asia.