The Netherlands
Open Access repositories
According to information supplied to the DRIVER Inventory Study, all 13 Dutch universities, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research support institutional repositories that have originally been made accessible by the common gateway with the name DAREnet. As from June, 2nd,2008, DAREnet will be fully integrated into the new portal NARCIS, is a service run by the KNAW.
There are 44 institutional repositories listed in OpenDOAR. All repositories are made accessible through DAREnet. DAREnet provides access to over 150,000 digital publications at 16 institutions. Cream of Science showcases the most prominent research from the Netherlands. It lists 219 top Dutch academics, providing worldwide access to their over 47,000 publications. Promise of Science enables full-text search of thousands of e-theses. Mandates are emerging for doctoral theses but at the time of writing there are no mandates operational or foreseen for other types of publications.
DARE is an excellent example of a national
model of comprehensive national partnership.
NARCIS is not only offering the information covered by the former service DAREnet, but it also the main entrance to datasets, Dutch research descriptions, experts and organisations. The sections Cream of Science and Promise of Science (already available in DAREnet) will also be present in NARCIS.
It provides access to over 150,000 digital Open Access publications at 16 institutions. Cream of Science showcases the most prominent research from the Netherlands. It lists 217 top Dutch academics, providing worldwide access to their 47,034 publications. About 60% of these can be accessed full-text (pdf). Promise of Science enables full-text search of over 19,000 e-theses. Mandates are emerging for doctoral theses but at the time of writing there are no mandates operational or foreseen for other types of publications.
The DRIVER Inventory Study goes on to say that the publication registry system in all universities is now linked to the institutional repository. So, the metadata of the institutional production will be imported into the repositories automatically. The registry application has a simple ‘upload button’ that enables a one-click posting of the publication itself. Evidence suggests that more and more authors are using this facility.
SURF
is the Dutch higher education and research partnership for information
and communication technology. It aims to improve education and research
by means of ICT. SURF removes barriers to functioning, accessibility and
cooperation to the maximum possible extent. This means "Open Standards",
"Open Source" and "Open Access". Open Access for SURF
means: access to knowledge, information, and data is essential in higher
education and research. Their use is the basis for the transfer of knowledge
(teaching) and for knowledge generation (research).
In terms of initiaves, the Netherlands baost a number of important projects:
DARE
was a very successful national initiative coordinated by the SURFfoundation
between 2003 and 2006. HBO-kennisbank
is the portal from a large group of universities of practices in the Netherlands.
The portal not only contains publications, but also student theses and
learning materials. LOREnet
is a portal for Learning Materials in all Higher Education. NARCIS
is a portal that contains research publications, datasets, research descriptions,
research organisations and information on researchers with their expertise.
As from July 2008 NARCIS takes over the role of DAREnet, and offers more
while The SURFshare
programme is not only focussing on Open Access, but is concerned with
the complete chain of Scholarly Communication.
The Utrecht Law Review is an Open Access journal offering an international platform for cross-border legal research. It is a good practice of electronic publishing that has been developed to show legal scholars the added value to deposit publications in digital repositories.
Innovations in e-learning and e-science are often inhibited by issues concerning digital rights. For this reason digital rights issues have been given a prominent place in the SURF activities and as a result the SURF Digital Rights Experts Group (SURFdirect) has been founded.
SURF has developed a number of practical tools to help authors determine which copyright rights they are transferring to their publisher and how the arrangements made can be recorded. eaxmples of tools include Licence to Publish, legal issues for e-theses a copyright toolbox, a checklist of publication agreements and model letters among others.
SURF has developed the following practical tools that deal with how to record the arrangements made regarding what an institution can do with an author’s publication and the inclusion of a publication in the institution’s repository and its further distribution and these can be found here.
The DRIVER wiki may be a useful source of further information.
Are there developments in this country that you would like to inform the DRIVER community about? If so, please visit the DRIVER wiki. There you will find guest editors' contributions to the countries pages. Information about the easy process of editing pages and how to obtain a password can be found on the wiki under "PmWiki Software". We look forward to your visit.
Last updated: 14-Nov-2008