Kathleen Shearer is the Executive Director of COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories), an international association of repository initiatives with a membership of over 150 institutions worldwide from over 40 countries on all 5 continents. As part of the next generation repositories project, COAR has been working on promoting and profiling a distributed model in which peer review and other types of assessment can be linked to pre-prints managed in different repositories. Shearer has been working in the area of open access, open science, scholarly communications, and research data management for over 20 years. She is an active member in many initiatives related to open science, such as the Research Data Alliance (RDA) and is also a research associate with the Canadian Association of Research Libraries.
