Inspiring national workshop on Research Information in the Netherlands

On 3 September 2019, Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) and the National Library (KB) organised an afternoon workshop on themes related to knowledge exchange in the fields of research information and open science.

The workshop was intended for repository administrators and managers, open access staff at research institutions, and other stakeholders. In all, around 60 people from universities, higher professional education and other research institutions were present at the KB.

First, with presentations by the KB and DANS, the harvesting of scientific publications by DANS (for its scientific portal, NARCIS) and by KB's E-depot was discussed. The E-depot stores open access scientific publications in a sustainable manner. This part was concluded with an interactive session in which some questions were asked using Mentimeter software, for instance about desired metadata updates. The answers led to some interesting discussion.

This was followed by two presentations about NARCIS. The first one addressed recent NARCIS innovations including the important role played by the Persistent Identifiers developed in the European FREYA project. The second presentation, by Elly Dijk (NOAD NL), concerned the development of NARCIS and its harvesting by OpenAIRE, which has resulted in all open access publications from Dutch scientific institutions being directly accessible in OpenAIRE.

Finally, two guest speakers, Just de Leeuwe (TU Delft Library & NOAD NL) and Arjan Schalken (VU University Amsterdam Library) gave presentations about the development of open access publications in the Netherlands. Just de Leeuwe discussed the numbers of open access publications provided by the universities to the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) for the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. The provisional percentage for 2018 is well over 50%, up from 2017. He described how the data had been collected and which choices were involved. Arjan Schalken spoke about the various challenges involved in achieving the government goal of 100% open access publications by 2020, the policy decisions to be taken, and the work processes required.

Afterwards, the participants continued to discuss the various topics for quite some time. They indicated that the meeting had been very instructive and inspiring. The presentations (largely in Dutch) can be viewed from the DANS website.