Open Access in Belgium
Repositories | Organisations | Projects | Journals | Copyright | Funding | Publishers | News | Other
Open Access Repositories
Belgium has 15 universities and 64 schools of HE. 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 of those, 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 or repository policy. The Belgian DRIVER website will soon offer access to all Belgian DRIVER-validated repositories thanks to the DRIVER software.
Current repositories being harvested and indexed by DRIVER:
- DSpace at UGent
- Document Server UHasselt
- Open Marine Archive VLIZ
- Doks at KHK
- Flemish Archive of Immovable Heritage
- University of Liège repository
Other Belgian repositories to be considered for DRIVER:
- Institution for Tropical Medecine
- Open Nature Archive from the Institution of Nature and Woods Research
- Institutional repository of KULeuven
- upcoming*: Institutional and consortial repositories of UCL (Louvain-la-Neuve) and ULB (Brussels).
- upcoming* Institutional repositories of UA (Antwerp), VUB (Brussels).
More info: http://www.driver-repository.be
Open Access Organisations/Groups
There is no national Open Access initiative. DRIVER Belgium has already brought major stakeholders at a national conference in 2007, where all university rectors minus one signed the Berlin Declaration.
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.
Open Access Projects/Initiatives
The Flanders Marine Science Institution and the University of Hasselt host a repository for african marine science documents, OdinPubAfrica: OdinPubAfrica
The Catholic School for Higher Education Kempen, KHK, has developed a customised software for Flemish repositories for BA theses, called DOKS
The French-speaking community has its own portal with Open Access doctoral theses: Bictel/e
The DRIVER project raises awareness by organising events and supports the development of repositories with political, legal and technical advice.
Open Access Journals
Copyright
Belgian Copyright Law A legal study group of the University of Namur, Juritic, who has also translated the Creative Commons License for Belgium , regularly organises workshops about digital copyright and Open Access issues. Contact for these workshops is severine dot dusollier at fundp dot ac dot be There are regular contacts between the members of this study group and the DRIVER staff.
Funding Policies
The major Flemish research funding body, the FWO, has mandated self-archiving in Open Access repositories since March 2007. Link to the Dutch text
Publishers and Open Access
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Current Local News & Events
The University of Liège has an ID/OA self-archiving mandate, following the National Conference on February 13th, 2007, where the rector gave a very inspired speech on the subject. The mandate will be implemented from the time the technicalities are completed.
The University of Ghent, DRIVER partner, is also looking into the possibility of an OA mandate
Other Topics
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Contributor's contact details
Karen Van Godtsenhoven, Belgian DRIVER contact Belgian DRIVER site
Page last modified: October 05, 2009, at 01:58 PM