This 
is a question that comes up again and again when we’re talking about the One Repo: how is it different from SHARE?
SHARE stands for SHared Access Research Ecosystem. It is an initiative of academic libraries in the USA, initially created as a response to the OSTP memo on public access. This memo was an important game-changer for how scholarly publishing will work in the USA, effectively expanding the NIH’s very successful public access policy across most federally funded research.
SHARE’s main contribution so far has been the creation of SHARE Notify. This is a system for producing a feed of publication-related events, such as the posting of a data-set in a repository, submission of a manuscript, or formal publication. The set of events that SHARE Notify has accumulated is available to be searched, and that database in some ways resembles the one that we’re building at The One Repo.
There are significant differences, though.
- SHARE is focussed primarily on the USA, while the One Repo’s goal is to cover the whole world — especially the areas neglected by other initiatives.
- SHARE focusses on research that is being published now, while the One Repo is equally interested in what has been published in the past.
- SHARE is interested in the whole publication cycle, whereas the One Repo is focussed only on research outputs.
Because our overall goal is the same — to remove barriers to research — there is potentially a lot of synergy between the two projects. At some point, we expect to start ingesting relevant data from SHARE’s database, which will help us to increase coverage. And we expect that SHARE will make use of our data, too. They will benefit from the One Repo’s work in picking up information from “long tail” sources — especially smaller open-access publishers, and institutional repositories that don’t advertise an OAI-PMH endpoint.
The One Repo blog 
As one of the SHARE leads, I’m disappointed to see that this is an almost entirely an inaccurate representation of SHARE.
(1) We have a broader view than the USA, but work with partners doing the same in other locales to minimize overlap (i.e., waste of resources). (2) We are interested in the past, but started with “now” as a mechanism to constrain the problem–that is changing rapidly. (3) We are interested in the whole research cycle, outputs included.
Correction would be appreciated. Thanks!
LikeLike
[I sent the following message off-list to Jeff some time ago. But he wasn’t able to reply, so I think it merits posting here.]
Regarding the specific points you made in your blog comment, I do disagree. First of all, I wonder whether you misread the third bullet point? To recapitulate, what I said was “SHARE is interested in the whole publication cycle, whereas the One Repo is focussed only on research outputs.” Your comment seemed to suggest that you thought I’d said the converse. Is that right?
On the other two points, I wrote “SHARE is focussed primarily on the USA” and “SHARE focusses on research that is being published now”. I still feel that these are fair assessments, and don’t actually seem to be contradicted by anything that you said in response. Yes, you have a broader view than just the USA: but I said that you are “focussed primarily” on it, not limited to it. Similarly, I didn’t mean to imply that you are interested *only* in newly published work, but once more that that’s where your primary focus is. Do you still feel those statements are wrong?
LikeLike
Lovely…the reply is still sitting in my drafts folder…Apple Mail! I’ll send that now, but relevant responses from that reply:
—
On the third bullet point, OneRepo having a subset of SHARE’s interest does not differentiate the projects. You’re still collecting the same data.
Your other statements are as accurate as saying that SHARE is only interested in the ~90 providers we currently have in the system. It’s an unfair representation that disregards basic practicalities that work does not happen immediately.
—
Broader context for the public, I have invited OneRepo to engage in collaboration with SHARE beyond simply using one another’s openly licensed data (as has been suggested) because that still means there’s significant overlap and waste of resources on what is a sizable problem.
The problem that both groups are attending to (no matter the claims in this FAQ) are big enough that efforts to differentiate the two projects (like this FAQ) are unnecessary. We can simply acknowledge the shared interests and collaborate on this huge, exciting problem.
If anyone–OneRepo or others–are interested in working together on this and can commit to open data and open tooling, I’d love to chat (jeff at cos dot io). If groups can’t commit to that level of openness, that’s unfortunate but not a problem–maybe someday. I still wish them the best of luck and just hope they can help minimize the spread of inaccurate information.
LikeLike
I just tried SHARE. It appears to make the usual mistake of indiscriminately including paywall and record only items, while offering no way to filter for only fulltext + free items.
LikeLike
Doesn’t SHARE point you to the Green-OA version of paywalled papers?
LikeLike
Hi, Triedit, I’m guessing you saw the demonstration discovery tool that we have up at http://osf.io/share. SHARE is the free, open dataset that supports tools like that. In terms of paywall or not, that information is oddly restricted by the typical ways publishers restrict access to their publications, but we are actively working on adding it to the data we collect.
LikeLike