Cooperative Digital Asset Management in the Scientific Field: Strategies, Policies, Interoperability and Persistent Identifiers

In this paper we present a series of activities carried out within the National Research Council of Italy (CNR) and aimed at the development of a unique, certified and open archive of CNR's digital research products. Starting from the description of CNR's distributed library system, we then briefly talk about CNR's involvement in OA initiatives and the role played by CNR's Information System Office in providing technological tools for digital asset management. Afterwards we try to point out some criticalities of OA archives. We then talk about the solution we propose for the development of a unique, certified and open archive using a cooperative approach that takes into account previous experiences, existing repositories, policy and organizational issues. We also present the processes we designed for content ingestion and validation and the strategies for persistent identification. We finally illustrate the technical solutions we have developed as prototype proposals for the community.