This presentation will focus on the role governance plays in ensuring the future of repositories and their content. How do we sustain and preserve open repositories while keeping the spark alive that started it all? How do we provide a reliable and stable repository platform and embrace blue-sky thinking? How do we keep the light of inspiration alive while working to keep the actual lights on? DSpace is now in its twenty-third year. How did it come this far, and what is the community roadmap of its future? arXiv is now in its thirty-fourth year and recently re-structured its governance. Comparing and contrasting these programs, this presentation will explore the impact governance models have in sustaining long-standing programs and how leadership teams stay the course while grappling with ever present challenges in a constantly changing scholarly communications ecosystem.

Digital Cultural Heritage institutions want to be able to use open solutions for their digital infrastructure. However, the landscape of open-source and open-access components tends to be siloed, leaving it up to users to figure out how to put the pieces of the puzzle together. This can present a barrier to adoption of open infrastructure, especially when commercial providers claim to offer easy access to a complete interoperable ecosystem. With the number of priorities to consider when implementing software, interoperability often falls through the cracks or defaults to low priority because by its nature interoperability requires the participation of multiple entities. It’s not always clear whose responsibility it is or why it matters. We will share observations on this topic from the perspective of the Lyrasis Research Infrastructure Communities and the Lyrasis Organizational Home for Community Supported Technologies, posing these questions for the wider open repository community to consider: (a) what role should individual communities play in creating a viable interconnected open ecosystem? (b) how can communities be accountable to each other to ensure that the ecosystem is created and is sustained?

Many resources exist for criminal justice data, but these data repositories focus on crime reports, court records, and victimization reports, with secondary focus on policing as a part of the criminal justice system. The lack of a dedicated resource for policing data--data collected or generated as part of policing activities--impedes transparency about how policing operates in practice. However, such a resource must address the privacy risks that arise from making this data available to researchers and others; overcome the technical challenges that arise from the absence of nationwide standards for the collection, organization, and storage of this data; and ensure meaningful public access. We enumerate details about these each of these criteria for establishing a national repository of policing data in the United States. We argue current technology can meet these needs, but that, in the absence of regulations governing dissemination of data obtained through open records laws, it is vital to facilitate ethical research about policing in the United States through design decisions guided by the Belmont Report. We conclude by noting one possible database ontology that could meet our criteria and highlight the importance of participation by the public as part of the design process.

A vast landscape of open scientific and scholarly repositories has arisen over the past two decades as a result of the shared understanding among researchers of the purposes and motivations for creating and maintaining individual institutional and domain repositories. Many of the next developmental steps envisioned and being undertaken for this landscape entail it evolving into a more integrated ecosystem of repositories that enhance or re-curate one another’s content, especially metadata, in ways that further the interests of individual researchers, their communities, and the broader research ecosystem..

Exploring possibilities of improved integration for enhancement and re-curation requires a shared understanding of the use cases and associated motivations for collaboration among researchers, repository managers, information service professionals (aka librarians), institutional administrators, and eventually research funders. This panel will catalyze and facilitate a discussion among these groups to identify the most compelling new scenarios for inter-repository integrated processes and re-curation functions, with a special focus on surfacing the motivations and value propositions for such scenarios. Panelists will serve to catalyze and facilitate a structured group discussion for these aims. The primary outcome from the panel-led discussion following OR2025 would be a consolidated summary of the discussion. that invokes the Chatham House Rule.