Netherlands
National Open Access Desk
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There are 14 research universities in the Netherlands, organised in the VSNU (Association of Universities in the Netherlands). 30 percent of all research is done at these universities. All eight University Medical Centres (UMCs), which are members of the Netherlands Federation of University Medical Centres (NFU), are partnerships between a teaching hospital and the medical faculty of a university.
In addition there are several research institutes: 10 hosted by KNAW (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) and 9 by the National Research Funder NWO.
The 36 universities of applied sciences are taking on a growing role in research and are organised in the Netherlands Association of Universities of Applied Sciences (Vereniging van Hogescholen).
All information on the Dutch research environment can be found at 'Science in figures' of the Rathenau Institute.
Support and landscape
An important organisation for the promotion of Open Science in the Netherlands is SURF, the collaborative organisation for research universities, research institutes and universities of applied sciences in the Netherlands.
Also the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science are involved in promoting open science.
All are participants of the National Platform Open Science.
National initiatives
- For an overview of the current policies and initiatives on Open Science, check the overview on the national Open Access website. In 2005, the Netherlands became the first country where all universities had their own repository. NARCIS is the central portal for the Dutch repositories. NARCIS harvest open and closed access publications from all the academic repositories and from other research institutes, and open and restricted data from various data archives. NARCIS is a service of DANS, Data Archiving and Networked Services.
Article 25fa of the Copyright Act allows researchers to share short scientific works (e.g. articles & book chapters), regardless of any restrictive publishers' guidelines.
Taverne Amendment
The law states:The maker of a short scientific work, the research for which has been paid for in whole or in part by Dutch public funds, shall be entitled to make that work available to the public for no consideration following a reasonable period of time after the work was first published, provided that clear reference is made to the source of the first publication of the work.The Dutch universities have decided to give open access an extra boost from 2019 by starting a pilot. On the basis of the Taverne Amendment, the publishers' versions of short scientific works can be shared after six months via the university repository. It is important that the researcher explicitly gives consent.
As a result of the pilot, 2500+ articles, book chapters and conference proceedings have already been published in Dutch Repositories. The results and outcomes are now evaluated at the VSNU, (Association of Dutch Universities) in order to see if policy can be made on this legislation (to be updated February 2020)
National working groups
There is a number of national working in the context of open science. Most of the working groups are in the context of the UKB, the Dutch consortium of university libraries and the National library of The Netherlands.
UKB Open Access working group
This WG monitors developments in the field of Open Access for university libraries and university colleges, and where necessary formulates action points that can be picked up by the members of the working group or their colleagues in the institutions.
UKB Working Group Licenses
Goal of this working group is making good agreements - commercial and legal - with publishers about prices and access to information.
UKB Research Impact Coordination Point
This group focuses on initiatives that contribute to (increasing) research impact and, where necessary, coordinates cohesion.
UKB Working group Research Data
The purpose of the WG research data is to exchange knowledge in the UKB and transfer this knowledge to the university research community.
Working group metadata
This working group is led by the National Library and DANS. The purpose of this working group is to make arrangements about the exchange of metadata.
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The national website about Open Access, www.openaccess.nl, in the Netherlands gives information, updates, and news about open access publishing for various stakeholders in the Netherlands. On this website you can find information about the monitoring of open access articles and the framework with open access definitions.
The website of the Dutch Association of Universities VSNU shows the number of open access publications in 2016 and 2017 according to definition framework. In 2018 54% of the peer-reviewed articles from the 14 Dutch universities are available open access. All articles published during the measurement year with one or more authors affiliated with a Dutch university were examined by the institutions. The study only looked at articles that 1) are aimed at a scientific audience; 2) were peer reviewed; and 3) were published in an academic journal. In 2016 42% of these articles were published as open access.
Source: J. de Leeuwe, TU Delft, 2019
NARCIS, the national aggregator of publication and data repositories, contains a number of graphs with in formation on open access publishing in the Netherlands. Two graphs present the current content in NARCIS, and contain an overview of the number of open access publications and the number of open access articles in NARCIS, coming from 36 repositories of the universities and other Dutch research institutions. Since 2013 there has been an upward trend in the number of open access publications and the number of open access articles in NARCIS. The other four graphs provide a snapshot of the contents of NARCIS with regard to the output of Dutch universities.
NARCIS contains 735.000 open access publications from Dutch Universities and research institutes, and 237,000 open research data from various data archives (October 2019).
OpenAIRE statistics
975675 OA publications in 444 repositories -
National policy
In February 2017 the National Plan Open Science in the Netherlands was published. This Plan shows the ambition of the involved institutes towards Open Science. The implementation of this plan will be followed up by the National Platform Open Science. Together with the publishing of the plan a new website was launched: National Plan Open Science.
The parties involved are Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, national funders NWO and ZonMw, the Academy KNAW, DANS, Association of Universities VSNU etc.
The focus of the Platform is to accelerate the key areas:
- Full open access publishing: The Netherlands' ambition is to achieve 100% open access in 2020. The leading principle in this regard is that publicly-funded research results should also be accessible to the public at no extra cost.
- Optimal reuse of research data: The aim of open science is that researchers reuse other parties' research data and services where possible and make their own data available as far as possible.
- Corresponding evaluation systems for recognition and rewards: in May 2018 the publication "Memo - Researcher Recognition and Rewarding" was published.
- Encouraging and supporting open science.
In May 2019 NPOS changed to a programma, with 10 projects in the field of the above mentioned topics.
Institutional policy
A couple of Dutch universities – Erasmus University Rotterdam (since 2010), Eindhoven University of Technology (2015), TU Delft (2016) and University of Groningen (2017) – have adopted an official open access policy for their institution. Almost all universities stipulate that PhD dissertations must be made publicly available in their repositories.
The universities of Twente, Utrecht and Delft encourage open access publishing through a special fund. VU University Amsterdam and Utrecht University and TU Delft support researchers wishing to set up open access journals.See for more information the national website on open access: openacces.nl.
Funder policy
In addition to direct funding by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science research in the Netherlands is also funded by the following organisations:
- Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) – NWO is of the opinion that research results paid for by public funds should be freely accessible worldwide. This applies to both scientific publications and other forms of scientific output. In principle, it must be possible to share research data with others as well. In the Regulation on Granting with respect to Open Access NWO asks for "immediate open access at the moment of publication". NWO also wants publicly funded research data to become Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR). With effect from 1 October 2016 NWO implemented a data management policy in all NWO funding instruments.
- NWO is one of the funders in Plan S, which will start in 2021
- Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) – The Academy believes that research data and publications based on publicly funded research should be freely accessible. All publications by KNAW researchers are freely available, preferably immediately but at the latest after 18 months. The same applies to research data unless there are compelling reasons (privacy, statutory regulations) that prevent this. KNAW makes budget funds available to encourage KNAW researchers and institutes to make their publications and data accessible through open access.
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Key networks and aggregators
There is widespread awareness of Open Access in the Netherlands. Since 2005 all Dutch universities, the Netherlands Association of Universities of Applied Sciences, the KNAW, NWO, the Royal Library and SURF have signed the Berlin Declaration. In 2005, the Netherlands became the first country where all universities had their own repository.
DANS, an institute of KNAW and NWO, provides access to all content of Dutch university repositories, KNAW, NWO, and a number of research institutes; through the national portal NARCIS. NARCIS provides access to (open access) publications, datasets of a number of data archives; and to descriptions of research projects, institutes and researchers. NARCIS has been developed by DANS, in close cooperation with the universities and other scholarly institutions.
The national Open Access website, www.openaccess.nl, provides information on open access publishing for various stakeholders.
Data repositories
NARCIS is the gateway that provides access to over 250,000 of scholarly datasets from researchers at Dutch universities and research institutes. DANS with the data archive EASY and 4TU.ResearchData provides durable storage and access to research data. These data sets are also made public by NARCIS.
Storage of research data during the research
In 2013 a number of Dutch universities, universities of applied sciences, and research institutes joined the DataverseNL, a partnership that jointly manages and deploys the Dataverse Network open source application for the archiving, citing and sharing of research data during the research by researchers themselves. The data management is in the hands of the institutions; DANS has been managing DataverseNL since May 2014.
Storage of research data after the research
DANS provides sustainable access to research data especially in the field of humanities and social sciences through EASY, an online archiving system. Researchers can use EASY to archive their own research data for the long term. Most data are open data or open after registration. 4TU.Centre for Research Data (4TU.ResearchData), a cooperation of TU Delft, TU Eindhoven, Wageningen University and Research Centre, and University of Twente, guarantees the storage, reuse and continuing accessibility of science and engineering research data.
Collaboration Research Data institutes
DANS, 4TU.ResearchData, and SURFsara have joined forces on sustainable data archiving within the Research Data Netherlands (RDNL) partnership. The partnership is also open to other parties.
More information
For more information on open data in the Netherlands see www.openaccess.nl.
National publishing initiatives
University Journals
To promote open science, and to retain copyright and ownership of texts, data, and all other products of research, universities should take control over publication and dissemination. With this project proposal we request funding for setting up a technical and editorial infrastructure for so-called University Journals, a new electronic open access publication platform with the appearance of a set of academic journals.
With University Journals, all products of research can be published quickly and fully, using university repositories. Building on existing infrastructure and expertise, University Journals require only modest resources and have many advantages over the current system that depends on commercial publishers.
University Journals are an immediate alternative to journals that charge open access fees and especially to the so-called predatory journals. In the longer term, University Journals can also be instrumental in achieving the goals of open science.
The requested funding for setting up University Journals would help finance a collaborative project by universities in the Netherlands and elsewhere in EuropeUniversity journals is a joint project of 14 universities
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Universitat de Barcelona
Erasmus University Rotterdam
Technische Universiteit Delft
Tilburg University
University of Essex
Utrecht University
University of Groningen
Wageningen University
Linköping University
University of Zurich
Maastricht University
University of AmsterdamMore information on this project will follow December 2019
Current University Publishing platforms
Uopen Journals is an incubator of Open Access Journals, Univerity Utrecht
TU Delft OPEN also publishes journals, dissertations and books.National agreements with publishers
Since 2015 national licenses with academic publishers are strongly connected with open access. The renewal of what is known as the ‘big deal’ towards 'publish and read' or transformative agreements is an important opportunity for negotiating with the publishers on this. Publishers have been offering their journals in big package deals for over a decade. This provides universities with access to the publisher’s entire range of titles. The Dutch universities will take that opportunity to discuss not just the extension of those licences with publishers, but also the transition to open access. Universities expect publishers to make a serious effort to facilitate this transition.
The negotiations with the publishers will be held in close cooperation with the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU) and UKB (the consortium of university libraries and the National Library of the Netherlands). Currently, 16 agreements, including Wiley, Springer, Elsevier, Taylor and Francis, RSC, SAGE and ACS, have been made with publishers. This means that articles from corresponding authors associated with VSNU will be published as open access and authors will not be charged. A dedicated webpage gives insight into the publisher agreements, workflows and the statistics and reveals the licenses online. 26.000 articles (Oktober 2019) are published because of the agreements with publishers. For more information please read the frequently asked questions on open access by the VSNU.
OA books
As is the case with open access journals for some time, there is no institutional or funders policy to financially support open access books
Some universities as Groningen, Leiden and Tilburg support open access books through participation in Knowledge Unlatched or by paying the costs of the Book Processing Costs (BPC) on behalf of the authors to publishersAmsterdam University Press is primary partner in the OAPEN project, concerned with the Open Access publishing of humanities and social sciences monographs.
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The national website about Open Access, www.openaccess.nl, gives information, updates, and news about open access publishing for various stakeholders in the Netherlands.
Visual material in order to promote open access is available at open access.nl. Dutch universities make great efforts to inform their academic staff about open access via web pages, special newsletters and the like. Symposiums and a range of other activities are held across the country each year during international Open Access Week. Every university has trained open access staff like repository managers and data librarians to support the researchers.
On the national website, www.openaccess.nl, you can find information about the monitoring of open access articles and the framework with open access definitions.
Research Data Netherlands (RDNL) provides the course Essentials 4 Data Support. This is an introductory course for those who provide support to researchers in storing, managing, archiving and sharing their research data (data support staff).
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Funding Agencies
The Netherlands has 3 major funding agencies which are listed here:
- Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW)
- The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO): NWO facilitates excellent, curiosity-driven disciplinary, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research.
- The Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development (ZonMW): ZonMw funds health research in the Netherlands and promotes the actual use of the knowledge this research produces.
Integrated in OpenAIRE
The Netherlands has 1 major funding agency integrated in OpenAIRE.
The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) (24.180 projects)
See also Monitor Statistics of Netherlands NWO
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