This year's Open Repositories theme, “Twenty Years of Progress, a Future of Possibilities”, resonates closely with the Fedora Community and reminds us how looking to the past can help chart our future. Throughout its 20+ year lifespan, Fedora has overcome challenges, embraced innovation, and experienced success. The release of Fedora 6.0 in 2021 marked a pivotal milestone, addressing technical hurdles while laying the groundwork for future sustainability in technology, operations, and community.

Fedora’s success is deeply rooted in its connected global community. Recognizing the challenge of declining contributor capacity, the Fedora Governance Group led a two-year strategic planning effort, culminating in the 2022 Fedora Community Roadmap. This collaboratively developed roadmap prioritizes the needs of users, fosters cross-community engagement, and highlights the critical role of collaboration in supporting diverse stakeholders.

This presentation will showcase Fedora’s intentional efforts to build partnerships with sister communities, create welcoming spaces for new voices, and innovate in user engagement. Presenters will share lessons learned from strategic planning and highlight new collaborative initiatives to ensure the long-term sustainability of our program. Attendees will gain insights into how collaboration and forward-thinking strategies can inspire other communities to “lift all boats” while navigating the future of open-source repository solutions.

When members of the Research Organization Registry (ROR) and Zenodo teams gave a workshop on ROR at Open Repositories in Stellenbosch in South Africa in 2023, more than one attendee mentioned that it would be useful if ROR’s organizations could be grouped by continent as well as by country to enable easier tracking of research associated with African research organizations and funders. The ROR team put this helpful suggestion on the ROR roadmap and then implemented it with the release of ROR metadata schema version 2.1: every one of the 110,000+ records for research organizations in ROR now includes information indicating the continent where that organization is located. In this presentation, we will share similar stories of how ROR works to serve a global community of research organizations and scholarly systems with diverse uses, needs, languages, alphabets, systems, organization structures, and regional identifiers through efforts to ensure global equity in ROR’s data, definitions, technology, and operations. With records for research organizations from 228 countries and research organization names in 128 languages, ROR already strives to be a truly global registry, but we know we can always do more, and we look to Open Repositories for help.

This presentation will present the results of the USRN Discovery Pilot Project, a collaboration of SPARC, the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), CORE and Antleaf, to enhance the discoverability of research papers in US repositories leveraging CORE as an indexing service for USRN repositories.

The project conducted actions in three strategic areas:

Assessing and quantitatively measuring discoverability and barriers to it at the beginning and end of the pilot project,

conducting interventions to increase discoverability, and

supporting interventions by technology and guidelines (provided by CORE services), to minimise effort and maximise effect.

The key results of the project include:

Around three-quarters of a million research outputs held in the selected US repositories have been made discoverable (a 50% increase) compared to the year before;

The project has made available the CORE Data Provider’s Guide as well as a selection of new and improved tools to support repositories in increasing their discoverability. These include the CORE Reindexing Button and Index Notification modules, Fresh Finds and the USRN Desirable Characteristics for Digital Publication Repositories checking tool.

The project team is now exploring ways to scale out this work to include more repositories.