|
"Publishing my research results and data on the web has strongly increased the visibility of my work. My code and data are downloaded about 200 times a month" |
|
|
|
|
|
|
The Netherlands is one of the leaders in the development of research repositories. Research repositories, also refered to as the green road to Open Access, are digital systems in which research universities and universities of applied sciences can store their research results and make them available to the public as far as possible. Such repositories are becoming increasingly important as a means of ensuring access to research results, both now and in the future. In the Netherlands there are two central gateways to Dutch repositories: - NARCIS gives access to the institutional repositories of the universities.
- And HBO Kennisbank (HBO Knowledge Base) is the portal for the repositories of the universities of applied sciences.
| 
|
Institutions upload material produced by their researchers to the institutional repository, i.e. a database that anyone interested can consult on the Internet. This prevents that knowledge being “locked away” in commercial databases. The information also becomes much easier to trace by using international standards for the descriptive metadata for each publication. The statistics on numbers and where they are can be found in the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR) and in the Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR).  Repositories are also shown on a world map at Repository66. Open Access repositories may be institutionally-based, enhancing the visibility and impact of the institution, or they may be centralised, subject-based collections like the economics repository RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) or the physics repository, arXiv. Institutional repositories are digital collections of the outputs created within a university or research institution. Whilst the purposes of repositories may vary (for example, some universities have teaching/learning repositories for educational materials), in most cases they are established to provide Open Access to the institution’s research output. Video: Prof. P. Balaram on Institutional Repository from Leslie Chan on Vimeo. AdvantagesStoring research results in a repository offers many advantages: - Visibility is increased because publications cannot be found only via the publisher – and in many cases only if one has taken out a subscription or licence – but also on the institution’s website, via the Dutch web portals NARCIS and HBO Knowledge Bank (HBO Kennisbank) or the European “DRIVER Information Space”. Google Scholar also derives publications from the repositories.
- Material uploaded to a repository is automatically stored for the long term in the e-Depot at the National Library of the Netherlands, where it is available for use by future generations.
- Information that is stored and made accessible digitally is consulted for a longer period and cited more frequently.
- A wide range of services can be provided on the basis of the material in a repository; for example, a personal homepage can be created or a portal dealing with a particular topic.
- People can also access the material that has been researched, described, and stored in a repository without needing to take out a subscription to a scientific/scholarly periodical (something that is becoming increasingly expensive).
|
|
Last Updated on Wednesday, 19 May 2010 21:41 |
|
|
|
|
|
