Tyler Walters, dean of university libraries at Virginia Tech, was named founding director of SHARE (SHared Access Research Ecosystem) October 6. SHARE was established in 2013 by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), the Association of American Universities (AAU), and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) in response to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) memo on “Expanding Public Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research.” SHARE’s mission, as stated in its press release, is “to help ensure the preservation of, access to, and reuse of research outputs.” Services provided will include a notification service to publicize research events, a central registry of research outputs, a discovery layer, and a content aggregation layer to facilitate the mining of large volumes of content. Walters will continue to serve at Virginia Tech during the two years of his directorship. LJ spoke with him shortly after his appointment was announced. LJ: You have extensive experience with archival materials, from paper to digital and hands-on to management. How has your career informed your position as director of SHARE, and how do you envision its mission? I’ve gone from physical archival work to working with digital materials and digital scholarship, moving forward into repository development. SHARE is about leveraging the repositories that are in the ecosystem already, and coordinating the higher education community to make sure that research and scholarly output is open wherever possible. We’re paying attention to the words of the White House OSTP memo, which is what instigated us to get together—we view our work as broader than that. Where is SHARE in its development? The first thing we’re working on in Phase One is the notification service, which we hope to have finished by fall of 2015. We have a prototype and there are a number of institutions testing it for us. We’re hoping by spring of 2015 we’ll be in beta mode, and in a year we’ll probably have the first release. The second phase is the registry of research objects coming from sponsored research, and that’s active. We’re ready to talk with potential partners and other parties who are interested in creating the registry. By [SHARE’s] keeping good documentation and metadata, other services can use that registry to harvest metadata and provide links, and it will be a good central place to find metadata about research material. We’re hoping to meet in the coming months with some groups who have expressed interest. I think of the user interface as Phase Three, the discovery layer. We’re looking at commercial search engines, to see what they can do to optimize their ability to search and retrieve the research output that we’re documenting. Also, there are discovery services in the public realm that we will be working with. We’re not working with a software developer at this point—our only partner so far is the Center for Open Science, to build the SHARE Notification Service. Do you think SHARE will encourage more digital repositories, more resource sharing, or something else? More sharing of research is truly what we’re after. A lot of higher education institutions have some form of repository, but there are some that do not. We’re hoping, for those who don’t have repositories but want one, to get them in touch with an institution or service that can help them. There are close to 500 repositories in the U.S., and I’m sure there will be more coming along. Just about every ARL institution has a digital repository now, and that’s what we’re trying to leverage. Usage metrics are a major part of SHARE’s plan—have you considered incorporating altmetrics into the algorithm? Eventually, yes. That’s also something we’ve discussed within the steering group, although we haven’t made specific plans. These components we’re building will and should leverage altmetrics—we recognize that we need to work with them. What individual contributions to SHARE are you hoping to see from ARL, AAU, and APLU? ARL is the coordinating entity for this work. The other two associations work with ARL closely on shaping the program, shaping ideas, helping with communications across memberships. Between them you’re catching all the major research institutions across the U.S., and we’re relying on those channels. This triumvirate is working together to keep things moving forward. These are issues that are much bigger than just libraries: its about what people out there can do with research materials, and what impact they’re going to have on society at large. What’s your relationship to CHORUS (Clearinghouse for the Open Research of the United States), the public access initiative proposed by the publishing industry? We’ve stayed in communication with them. They’re also working on a plan to comply with OSTP, and we’d like to see them use our notification service for research release events. It doesn’t matter if you’re a library, a publisher, or a federal agency—it will be useful. What challenges do you anticipate to SHARE’s implementation? We’re talking about working with hundreds, if not thousands, of institutions to make material reusable—that number alone provides some challenges. The OSTP memo refers to depositing works somewhere that is publicly accessible, and to tell the sponsoring agencies where it is. We’re looking at automating “telling” people about the objects deposited through the notification service. Metadata is a particular challenge. We need to know grant numbers from the agencies, the program’s name under that agency, the contact points for the principal investigator, and more—those aren’t always collected. We need to have good robust metadata, and that will take coordination across agencies, universities, and libraries. It’s something we need to work on, but is an issue we can surmount. That’s what we bring to the table, those of us who work in SHARE. Metadata and libraries are well linked to one another, so we have that expertise. Do you feel SHARE will have buy-in from potential users/researchers? In a word, yes. It’s been really amazing to me, the folks who have come along and asked, “How can I help?” There’s interest and buy-in across the spectrum, lots of buy-in from the research library and higher education communities—there are people seeing the need, so a lot of good feedback from universities and from their leadership. We have buy-in from some of the federal agencies—we’ve been discussing things with them and it’s gone well. CENDI, an interagency group dealing with technology, data, and information resources, has been a great place to have some of those conversations. I don’t know that we’ve had anybody say we’re all wrong-headed. I want to emphasize that these first components are the foundational items we need to help higher education institutions, but this is just the beginning. We’re going to be working on more program planning so that SHARE can help higher education institutions further, and can improve systems and policies around research output.