In a Press Release issued today, Dspace Foundation and Fedora Commons have confirmed long-standing rumours in announcing a ‘working collaboration.’

“Today two of the largest providers of open source software for managing and providing access to digital content, the DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons, announced plans to combine strengths to work on joint initiatives that will more closely align their organizations’ goals and better serve both open source repository communities in the coming months.”

Cliff Lynch was quick to spot the potential for this announcement to do far more than merely fiddle around the edges of two silo-based architectures, and is quoted in the release as saying;

“Repositories are a key part of the infrastructure for supporting scholarly work, and they need to integrate more effectively with a range of other evolving components. I think there are great opportunities for DSpace and Fedora to work together not only on repository interoperability but on common approaches to repository roles in the scholarly and scientific workflows.”

Established watchers of Talis blogs will know that I’ve shared some of Andy Powell’s concerns about the role of repositories in the past… and I look forward to seeing how these two organisations move past the positive words of their press release and begin to deliver tangible improvements to the ways in which repositories are considered, constructed and used.

And for those who want to see more of Andy explaining his point of view, the video of his presentation to a Talis Research Day last month is included, below, and the slides are on slideshare or embedded within his post.