Belgium

Belgium has 15 universities and 64 schools of HE or polytechnics. The French speaking universities are grouped under three academies: the Academy of Louvain, the Academy Brussels-Europe and the Academy of Wallonia-Europe. The Flemish-speaking Universities are all aligned with schools of HE with the same ideology (e.g. catholic, state, free,...).
Alongside these, there are many subject-based research institutions in the two language communities.
The authorities for science, research and innovation are distributed between the federal government and the local governments, which makes it difficult to have one common Open Access repository policy. The Belgian DRIVER website will soon offer access to all Belgian DRIVER-validated repositories thanks to the DRIVER software.

DRIVER has established contact with the universities and wrote to all the schools of HE: almost all rectors and the general president of the schools for HE have signed the Berlin Declaration for OA to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities in 2007. Two ministers of science as well as the two major funding institutions did the same. Hence, the majority of the Belgian research administration is aware of Open access, repositories and the DRIVER project. Many institutions have expressed their interest to become a DRIVER content provider.

The University of Liège, which has an institutional OA mandate, is founder of the EurOpenscholarship initiative, a European assembly of rectors which supports universities in implementing OA mandates and leads strategic initiatives to push Open Access forward as the new mode of scientific communication.

Belgium boasts several OA initiatives such as that the Catholic School for Higher Education Kempen, KHK, which has developed a customised software for Flemish repositories for BA theses, called Doks, the French-speaking community which has its own portal with Open Access doctoral theses and the Flanders Marine Science Institution and the University of Hasselt which host a repository for african marine science documents called OdinPubAfrica. Similarly, the University of Liège, which has an institutional OA mandate, is founder of the EurOpenscholarship initiative, a European assembly of rectors which supports universities in implementing OA mandates and leads strategic initiatives to push Open Access forward as the new mode of scientific communication.

The major Flemish research funding body, the FWO, has been mandating self-archiving in Open Access repositories since March 2007.

The DRIVER wiki may be a useful source of further information.

Please visit the Belgium website for details of recent developments and news.

Last updated: 14-Nov-2008