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Jun 30, 2023
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Launching the new research portal for The Netherlands

Jun 30, 2023

As of July 3, the Dutch research portal NARCIS will be replaced by The Netherlands Research Portal on OpenAIRE CONNECT that covers the publications, datasets and projects of research institutes in The Netherlands. The portal aims to connect the Dutch research to a broad audience of (inter)national researchers, journalists, policy makers and companies. 

Since 2004 NARCIS was the national aggregator of the Dutch repository infrastructure and has disseminated the Dutch research output via scholarly search engines to researchers. NARCIS also had its own portal, that has been widely used by journalists and policy makers. The announced end of NARCIS in January resulted in a whole new research portal for The Netherlands, built together with OpenAIRE, UKB and SURF, that will officially launch on July 3.

With the new portal we recognize the importance of making Dutch research output visible to a wider audience than just the research community. The new portal can be used to get a good overview of the Dutch research landscape. Universities and research organizations provide content to the portal and the initiative has support from SURF (collaborative organization for IT in research and education), UKB (a partnership of university libraries and national library), the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), the Dutch Research Council  (NWO), SHB (libraries of the applied universities), Netherlands Federation of University Medical Centers (NFU) and Universities of the Netherlands (UNL). 

Comparison of functionality

Most functions of NARCIS are now available from the OpenAIRE portal. Some of the functionality may differ though. We will cover the most basic differences here:

Content – Just like in NARCIS, most research output is indexed, such as research projects, publications, datasets and software. Besides the sources that were registered at NARCIS, additional content from OpenAIRE Graph is provided based on affiliation information found in other records. Because the publications come from different sources, records are enriched with additional metadata. Searching through the contents has even become easier due to the Advanced Search possibilities. Some sources are still in the stage of indexing, but the latest Narcis contents are still available in the meantime. 

Distribution – NARCIS distributed the contents of Dutch repositories to several aggregators such as Unpaywall. The UKB has guided these repositories to register their endpoints separately. Aggregators and researchers who want to use the data of the Netherlands Research Portal can use the API or a data dump of the OpenAIRE Graph as described on the Develop page.

Classification – In NARCIS there was basic classification of researchers by research area. In OpenAIRE the publications themselves are labeled by AI into several fields of science that can be searched on. Another automatic classification is on the adherence of the publication to one of United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, that indicate for example whether an article contributes to solving the world hunger problem. Both classifications may help journalists and policy makers get a better grasp on what type of research is being done in The Netherlands.

Expert (Author) profiles – NARCIS had a functionality where researchers with a current position could be searched by field of research and projects, very useful for journalists and potential collaborations. At the moment it is not yet possible to do so, but expert pages are on the roadmap of OpenAIRE. An easy way to retrieve authors in the meantime is to look-up current articles by field of science and then check the orcid profiles of the authors.

Linking – NARCIS provided limited functionality to add or correct relevant information, such as the ORCID of an author. The new portal provides advanced mechanisms to improve the quality of the information and send this back to the original sources. Users can easily login to the new research portal, register their ORCID and link it to their publications, projects, data and software.

Monitoring  - Where NARCIS offered a basic overview of open versus closed content, OpenAIRE provides a monitor dashboard that includes much more information. For example on the type of Open Access (green, gold, hybrid, bronze), the organizations in the set, funders, data sources, top journals, et cetera.

Roadmap

Even though there are many additional features, there are still some things that might improve the use(fulness) of the Netherlands Research Portal. Therefore we have scheduled some short and long term goals: 

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In memoriam: History of NARCIS

NARCIS started out in 2004 as a continuation of the Dutch Research Database (Nederlandse Onderzoek Databank - NOD) to support the collaboration and interoperability of the Dutch repositories (that started within DAREnet at the time) from universities and research institutes together with NWO. Its main focus was on disseminating Open Access publications, though the portal later also started aggregating metadata only records. In its almost 20 year lifespan, there have been some important milestones:

  • 2011 250.000th publication in Open Access
  • 2020 Integration NARCIS PID-graph
  • 2020 300.000th Open Access dataset
  • 2022 1.000.000th publication in Open Access
With the Netherlands Research Portal on OpenAIRE we hope to continue that legacy and stay a beacon for Open Science in The Netherlands.

Additional information

Have a look at our new research portal: https://netherlands.openaire.eu/ 
For our previous release on the collaboration for the Netherlands Research Portal see: https://www.openaire.eu/next-narcis-dutch-research-portal-on-openaire

For questions please contact: Rutger de Jong  r.m.de.jong@library.leidenuniv.nl or use the Feedback form