Report on the 20th International Conference on Open Repositories (OR2025)
The 20th International Conference on Open Repositories (OR2025) was held in the City of Chicago, Illinois, USA, from June 15th to 18th, 2025. In this brief report, Tyng-Ruey Chuang outlined a few sessions in the main conference program and the depositar lab’s participation.
The venue of Open Repositories 2025 (OR2025) was at the University of Chicago Lab School nearby the campus of the University of Chicago. The main conference was held on June 16-18 while workshops were given on the 15th. Three members of the depositar lab (Tyng-Ruey Chuang, Cheng-Jen Lee, and Li Fan Wang) attended OR2025. We are thankful to the Local Host Organizing Committee for their hospitality and for arranging our accommodation at the Campus North Residential Commons, a modern facility in the heart of the UChicago campus and within walking distance to the conference venue.
The conference started with a keynote from Heather Joseph, the Executive Director of SPARC, on The Role of Open Access to Knowledge in a Challenging Political Landscape. Our presentation, on Automated Data Analytics: A Statistical Dashboard Built with GitLab CI/CD for a Data Repository Based on CKAN, was given by Ms Li Fan Wang, who is a graduate student from the National Cheng Kung University supported by Academia Sinica, in the Developer Track Session 2. The presentation was well received; in the Q&A session the team answered several questions from the audience.
Presentations in OR2025 are all timely and interesting. In particular, I am attracted to a presentation from the Brazilian Institute for Information in Science and Technology on Recognizing Software as a Critical Component in Open Science: Advancing an Interoperable, Community-Driven Vision for Infrastructures which is aligned with our approach in reusing and extending open source software, such as CKAN, for research data infrastructures. We also learn about new development at Figshare, Archipelago Commons, Dataverse, Fedora, Dspace, and InvenioRDM in Session 1 of Repository Showdown. We are very happy to meet a researcher from the West And Central African Research and Education Network (WACREN) and to learn that, as is the case at the depositar, they also use ARK to issue persistent identifiers for datasets at BAOBAB, an Invenio-based research data repository provided by WACREN to their member institutions. The presentation from the Fedora Community on finding its future path by learning from the past and bringing others together is very inspiring.
Following the tradition of the Open Repositories conferences, the presentation materials from OR2025 can now be found in a collection at Zenodo. Previously we had presented at Open Repositories in 2015, and from 2021 to 2025. Open Repositories 2026 will be held online on June 8-11, 2026. We plan to continue our contribution to this important series of conferences on research data infrastructures.
