Science accessible to everyone
Feb 22, 2010
Researchers at Dutch research universities are making the results of their scientific research available to everyone (open access).
Almost all digital journal articles can be filed in a digital archive that is maintained by the university and is made fully accessible to the public. This will significantly promote use of the results derived from scientific and academic research within and outside of the university.
Reason
Scientific research is vital to society, to professionals and to the corporate world. Furthermore, in the Netherlands, a great deal of the research being conducted depends on public funding. These were the main motives which led to the universities’ decision to promote open access to their research results.
Open access
After their work has been checked and selected by colleagues (peer review), researchers publish the results of their work in journals published by academic and scientific publishers. Universities pay by means of subscription and licenses for the services of these publishers. These publishers have been working to facilitate open access. Almost all publishers allow the final, approved author version of articles to be filed in the universities’ digital archives, from which it is openly accessible to all interested parties.
As an extension to this, the Dutch research universities have reached an agreement with the international publishing house of Springer that all articles published by Dutch university researchers in this publisher’s journals will be made available in open access with the author’s prior consent. This agreement will remain effective until 2011. An agreement has also been reached with Elsevier, the leading academic publisher for the universities, to launch a pilot to explore the possibility of increasing this access to an even greater extent.
Sijbolt Noorda, Chairman of the Association of Universities (VSNU), applauds these developments. ‘Science is in the general interest of the public and should be accessible to the public. Dutch researchers are very serious about this.’