Kathleen Shearer is the Executive Director of COAR, an influential international association that is dedicated to advancing the transformational role of repositories in scholarly communications.
Shearer has been a prominent figure in open access, open science, scholarly communications, and research data management for close to 20 years. Over the past 15 years, she has worked through COAR to build a truly global coalition of repositories and repository networks, ensuring that repositories are recognized as critical infrastructure for open science in national and continental policies; and that repositories innovate and adopt good practices.
Based in Montreal, Canada, she actively contributes to numerous organizations working to advance open science at a global scale including the Research Data Alliance, UNESCO Open Science Working Groups as well as numerous regional organizations such as the LIBSENSE Africa and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries. One of her major achievements has been leading COAR’s Next Generation Repositories and the COAR Notify initiatives, which have set new standards and practices to enhance repositories’ functionality to meet the needs of the open science in the future, including repositories playing a more prominent role in the diamond OA ecosystem via the “Publish, Review, Curate” model of scholarly publishing.
