Kathleen Shearer has been the Executive Director of COAR since 2013 and has been working in the area of open access, open science, scholarly communications, and research data management for over 20 years. COAR is an international association with over 150 members and partners from around the world representing libraries, universities, research institutions, government funders and others. COAR brings together individual repositories and repository networks in order to build capacity, align policies and practices, and act as a global voice for the repository community.
Shearer is based in Montreal, Canada and participates in numerous other organizations to advance open science around the world. She is the author of numerous publications and delivered many presentations at international events. Most recently, she was the lead author of the paper Fostering Bibliodiversity in Scholarly Communications: A Call for Action (April 2020). She is also a Research Associate with the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) and has been instrumental in many of CARL’s activities related to open science, including the launch of the Portage Initiative in Canada, a national research data management network.