Repository Networks: Past, Present and Future

Repositories represent critical infrastructure for open science / open scholarship. They preserve and provide access to a wide range of valuable research and educational resources, including articles, pre-prints, research data, images, software, and so on. However, the value of any individual repository is greatly enhanced when it becomes part of a distributed network, enabling resources to be more discoverable, linked with other related content, and part of the larger international corpus of international research. This article discusses the evolution of repository networks since the early 2000s and presents the current vision of the COAR Next Generation Repository Initiative to significantly enhance the networking capabilities of repositories.