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 50 countries on all 5 continents. COAR is developing a model for scholarly communications based on a global network of open access repositories and actively promotes the role of libraries in the future of scholarly communication. 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.