Workshop Monitoring Open Access in the Netherlands

In the Netherlands, the former State Secretary Sander Dekker outlined in a letter to the Dutch House of Representatives in November 2013 that the Dutch government wishes that publicly funded research should in principle be freely accessible. He aimed to have 60% of Dutch academic articles available through open access within five years (2019) and 100% within ten years (2024). In April 2016 at the Amsterdam Conference ‘Open Science – From Vision to Action’, hosted by the Netherlands’ EU Presidency this target changed to 100% open access in 2020.

That raised the question of how far the Netherlands is in the ambition to have 100% open access publications realized in 2020? Can the universities give these numbers by using the CRISs? Can the percentage of open access publications be found in the national scholarly portal NARCIS, hosted by DANS (Data Archiving and Networked Services)? Or can these percentages can be given by using other resources like OpenAIRE or Unpaywall?

[caption id="attachment_3280" align="alignleft" width="632"] from the presentation of Thed van Leeuwen, CWTS


There are many open questions, which is why DANS organised a workshop on monitoring open access regarding the Dutch situation on 23 May 2018. During the workshop four speakers presented their methods, there was an interactive part organized by Jeroen Bosman and Bianca Kramer, followed by an hour of discussion with a panel, existing of the speakers, and the audience.

The speakers were:

• Jeroen Bosman and Bianca Kramer (University Utrecht): Open access monitoring – goals and methods

Levels of OA can be measured on the basis of open available external data, (such as Unpaywall data). The overview of publications themselves can come from institutions themselves or from e.g. Web of Science, Scopus or Dimensions. In this way, different types of OA (green, gold, hybrid, bronze) can be determined in an unambiguous and institution-independent way. The speakers talked about the advantages and disadvantages of this approach.

• Thed van Leeuwen (CWTS): Monitoring of Open Access publishing in the Dutch academic system

To measure OA, CWTS has developed a methodology that Thed van Leeuwen presented during the workshop. Used sources were the DOAJ list, the ROAD list, CrossRef, PubmedCentral and OpenAIRE.

• Just de Leeuwe (TU Delft): Open Access monitoring in the Netherlands

For the measurement of OA publications within Dutch universities, the classification of gold/hybrid/green has been chosen. While there is consensus on what we understand under OA, there is less uniformity about how we can measure open access articles. Just de Leeuwe talked about the process and methodology of OA measurements and important outstanding questions.

• Emil Bode (DANS): Open Access monitoring using NARCIS

Emil Bode compared available data from the national portal NARCIS with open available data from Unpaywall. He explained more about his findings and possibilities to help improve these systems by comparing data from different systems, and thus increase the reliability of OA monitoring.

The presentations of this workshop can be found on the website of DANS: https://dans.knaw.nl/nl/actueel/workshop-monitoring-open-access.