Towards the interoperability of scholarly repository registries

Abstract The enactment of Open Science relies on scholarly repositories that make research products findable and accessible, while scholarly repository registries maintain authoritative metadata and persistent identifiers (PIDs) to help researchers and infrastructure providers discover and access needed repositories. However, the proliferation of repositories targeting different research products (e.g., publications, data, and software) or serving specific disciplines has led to the creation of multiple registries whose scope is not mutually exclusive. Such a fragmented landscape poses significant concerns regarding authoritativeness, disambiguation, and coverage for scholarly communication service and infrastructure providers who consume content from these registries. These providers must either limit their focus to a single registry or manage complex data fusion strategies to integrate diverse repository profiles from various sources. While favouring the existence of a plurality of registries, this paper advocates for their interoperability, which is essential to eliminate the aforementioned barriers and enable their full, unambiguous utilisation. We analyse the data models of four prominent registries—FAIRsharing, re3data, OpenDOAR, and ROAR—and classify their properties and overlap. We provide a crosswalk between their data models and suggest a common data model shared across the examined registries to pave the way toward interoperability. As a means of validation, we include a coverage evaluation of the proposed data model.The paper adopts a pragmatic approach towards scholarly registry interoperability and suggests a common metadata model to foster the exchange of information across these platforms. The purpose of the paper is to serve as a cornerstone, initiating and engaging the community in discussions surrounding the interoperability of scholarly repository registries.