Open Access in the Netherlands
Repositories | Organisations | Projects | Journals | Copyright | Funding | Publishers | News | Other
“Our mission of disseminating knowledge is only half complete if the information is not made widely and readily available to society. New possibilities of knowledge dissemination not only through the classical form but also and increasingly through the open access paradigm via the Internet have to be supported. We define open access as a comprehensive source of human knowledge and cultural heritage that has been approved by the scientific community.”
- Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. October 2003. Signed in the Netherlands by KNAW, NWO, SURF and all the Dutch universities.
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 has been fully integrated into the new portal NARCIS, a service run by the KNAW.
NARCIS is not only offering the information covered by the former service DAREnet, but is also the main entrance to datasets, 70,000 restricted access publications, Dutch research descriptions, experts and organisations. It provides access to over 186,000 digital Open Access publications at 25 repositories. The section Promise of Science is incorporated into NARCIS.
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.
Open Access Organisations/Groups
- 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).
- The department Research Information of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) hosts and develops the portal NARCIS that is the gateway to the open access publications in the Netherlands. This is done in close cooperation with the Dutch universities, NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research)and SURFfoundation.
Open Access Projects/Initiatives
- NARCIS is the national portal that contains (open access) 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.
- The SURFshare programme (2007-2010) is not only focussing on Open Access, but is concerned with the complete chain of Scholarly Communication.
- 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.
Open Access Journals
- 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.
Copyright
“To assist stakeholders—including authors, publishers, librarians, universities and the public—to achieve maximum access to scholarship without compromising quality or academic freedom and without denying aspects of costs and rewards involved.” - Objective of The Zwolle Principles
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:
- Licence to Publish Standard model to record publication arrangements in an agreement (licence).
- E-theses: legal issues The legal issues identified for those documents also need to be considered when a born digital or a converted paper ETD is deposited in an institutional repository and made available.
- Copyright Toolbox A step-by-step plan for drawing up an agreement or to use relevant components so as to adapt an existing agreement.
- Checklist of publication agreements A method for determining what elements are important for both authors and publishers when publishing a work.
- Model letters Model letters granting permission for the once-only use of a work.
SURF has developed the following practical tools. These 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:
- Licence to Deposit When a publication is included in an institution’s repository and the parties wish to record the relevant arrangements.
- Legal Toolkit for dissertations
- Communication Toolkit for acquiring dissertations SURF developed the Communication Toolkit to help institutions approach scientists and scholars – both directly and via stakeholders – so as to encourage them to include their dissertation in the repository.
Other useful tools:
- Schedule for digital dissertations, with legally relevant action to be taken at various points This schedule clarifies the points during the course of producing a dissertation when legal arrangements need to be made between the PhD candidate and the institution.
- Overview of PhD regulations This document lists the institutions that have a set of PhD regulations, with the provisions contained in those regulations.
- “Notice and Takedown” procedure This is a useful overview for institutions that already have a repository or that want to create one; it helps them establish a procedure for dealing with complaints.
- Management of Copyrights it deals with copyright ownership in higher education, university policy on copyright and arrangements between universities, authors and publishers.
- Applying Open Access on Journal Papers This paper is exploring the application of the Zwolle Principles to the open access model.
- Towards good practices of copyright in Open Access Journals - A study among authors of articles in Open Access journals
The following practical tools can assist authors in recording what other parties can do with their publications:
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Aknowledgements
- Gerard van Westrienen (SURFfoundation, SURFdirect)
- Arjan Hogenaar (KNAW, NARCIS)
Contributors' contact details
Dr. Marjan Vernooy (Steering Committee), vernooy@surf.nl
Drs. Maurice Vanderfeesten, vanderfeesten@surf.nl
Drs. Elly Dijk, elly.dijk@bureau.knaw.nl
SURFfoundation
email: info@surf.nl
tel: +31 (0)30 234 66 00
SURFfoundation
KNAW Research Information
email: narcis@bureau.knaw.nl
tel: +31 (0)20 462 86 58
SURFfoundation
Page last modified: October 05, 2009, at 03:52 PM