Hi everyone, I want to welcome you all to Open Repositories 2022 in Denver.

Unfortunately, I can’t be with this this week in Denver, but I wish you all an amazing week.

My job is basically to give lots of thanks to people who have made this week possible. So first of all, I want to thank our hosts, George, Beth and Andrew who have done amazing work making our first physical conference since 2019 happen.  I also want to thank our program committee co-chairs, Helen, Kathryn and Harish, who’ve been doing lots of work getting the program together, getting the call for papers out, working with the wider program committee and just checking that everything’s running. It has been a tricky situation this year, as you’ll all realise and appreciate. So huge thanks to them for the work they’ve been doing in preparation and this week. Thanks to the wider program committee who’ve been working on all the different tracks pulling things together, reviewing, getting all these programs together, working with lots of Excel spreadsheets. So huge thanks to the wider program committee for making this happen and pulling everything together. It’s a really exciting program that we’ve got in place.

Thanks to our sponsors for making this happen and for bearing with us as things have taken a wee while longer than usual. They are 4 Science, Atmire, Lyrasis, the University of Colorado Boulder, Samvera, Cayuse and Ubiquity Press. So huge thanks to them for supporting us and for Colorado State University Libraries  for their support of the poster session.

I want to thank everybody who submitted proposals. It’s an anxious period once we put those call for proposals out. So huge thanks to everybody who submitted proposals and has come along to speak this week. Huge thanks to our reviewers,  without whom we wouldn’t be able to get the program together and many review proposals year after year , and thanks to our session chairs for helping things run on track.

Huge thanks to those who we haven’t been able to thank in person who got things together in the last two years as well. In 2020 with a quick switch to virtual and the wider conference that we held last year across many times zones. Huge thanks to the those who’ve been on the steering committee over the last few years. Listen out for more at the Open Session about vacancies and how you can get involved. We also have expressions of interest out for our host for 2024, and there’s more about that on the open repositories website.

I want to reflect again and thank once again those who supported us for our last two years of virtual conferences. A huge, huge thanks to Ellen and Mimi, for their support. It was a really tough decision when we postponed open repositories 2020 and we never imagined at that time that we’d be having two years of virtual conferences. So huge thanks to Ellen and Mimi for working with us, enabling us to make difficult decisions and getting those communications out as quickly as possible.  We are really, really looking forward to being in Stellenbosch, South Africa next year. We hoped to be there in 2020, so it’s great that we’ll be there in 2023. A huge thanks to Liz, Iryna, and Layla for chairing our virtual conferences in 2020 and 2021.  Particularly Iryna who picked up the mantle in 2020 and made a virtual conference happened, as well as Leila and Liz who joined her to ensure that our community had an opportunity to come together virtually as well as reach out to new members. We hope to continue this with our in-person and virtual events going forwards

Huge thanks also to the Steering Committee who meet monthly and have had to make some really tough decisions over the last couple of years. I also want to thank those who stepped off the Steering Committee in the last few years, Jon, Jryki, Holly, Elin, and Simeon. Huge thanks to everything you’ve done, there’s a lot of knowledge that they’ve been passing on. I also want to thank Torsten, the Vice chair, who’s been supporting me and is in Denver and huge, huge, huge thanks to Sarah. Sarah has given so much to open repositories and the community. A huge thanks to Sarah personally from me. I greatly valued our regular conversations over lockdown and her friendship and support, she’s been invaluable and we will all miss her and her knowledge when she steps off the Steering Committee later this year.

I wish you all the best of times and I really wish I could be with you. I’m looking forward to seeing as many of you as possible next year in Stellenbosch.

Thank you and have a great week.