Skip to main content

News 

Published
May 2, 2023
Author
# Topics

Follow Us

Next Narcis: Dutch research portal on OpenAIRE

May 2, 2023

UKB, SURF and OpenAIRE, three prominent organisations in the field of open knowledge, e-infrastructure, and IT innovation, are excited to announce they have signed a Memorandum of Understanding to collaborate building a search portal for all Dutch research output, soon to be launched at netherlands.openaire.eu

This portal will replace the previous one, NARCIS, which will be decommissioned in July 2023. It will be a game-changer for researchers, institutions, and the wider public, enabling seamless access to the latest Dutch research outputs. It will also provide journalists, policy makers and researchers with user-friendly access to tools that will allow them to find interdisciplinary research and drive innovation and change.

This collaboration between UKB, SURF and OpenAIRE, aims to enhance the efficiency of accessing valuable resources by establishing direct connections between literature repositories, data repositories, and CRIS systems with OpenAIRE's harvester. This new approach represents a notable improvement over the previous method of providing information via Narcis, facilitating more seamless and efficient data retrieval for connecting to the OpenAIRE Graph, and providing feedback from the BROKER service to improve the metadata quality. 

OpenAIRE will offer a CONNECT gateway which acts as a single entry-point portal to all Dutch research outputs and funding. The MONITOR service attached to the portal will act as an analytics dashboard to show, amongst others, Open Science uptake within The Netherlands and collaborations between organisations. SURF and UKB will coordinate to make their members’ repositories compliant with the OpenAIRE Guidelines and help them register with OpenAIRE PROVIDE, and offer the opportunity to share the usage statistics of the research output.

Dutch research organisations will be given also the opportunity to benefit from a range of additional services provided by OpenAIRE. The basic services for providers encompass metadata enrichment, such as the inclusion of missing identifiers and links with datasets and projects. In addition, usage counts are made available to providers as a key feature. Furthermore, specialised services, such as data anonymization via Amnesia, citation tracking with OpenCitations, and APC payment options through OpenAPC, will be available for individual organisations. These services cater to the unique needs of organisations seeking to optimise their research workflows and streamline their research processes. For end-users, Single Sign-On via EduGain/SURFconext is enabled wherever feasible, facilitating effortless connectivity of publications with projects.

Natalia Manola, CEO at  OpenAIRE, said, "Our goal is to empower national communities in Europe and beyond to take ownership of the scientific content they create, curate it, promote open access journals and repositories, connect with funding agencies, and have control over how the content is presented, discovered, and evaluated. We are thrilled to announce our partnership with UKB and SURF to establish a state-of-the-art research portal that will significantly improve the discoverability, tracking, and analysis of all Dutch research outcomes. Collaborating together allows us to learn from each other and achieve more and better results.”

Hilde van Wijngaarden, Chair of UKB, added, "UKB is committed to supporting and accelerating scientific progress. We are delighted to partner with OpenAIRE and SURF in this exciting project, which will make the Dutch research output open and freely available for anyone to search and use. We believe that this collaborative approach is vital in sending a powerful message that the Dutch libraries adopt and support this European non-commercial open research information infrastructure, to make it more sustainable in operation, safeguarding European sovereignty of information about research for transparent reporting and assessment, and to enable the free use of the data to spread in other new research information services such as knowledge graphs."

Ron Augustus, Chief Innovation Officer at SURF cooperative and member of SURF's board of directors, said, "SURF's mission is to improve the quality of education and research with the aid of IT innovation. Through this project, we will work with our members and the libraries in particular to strengthen Open Science and promote responsible handling of research information. We will focus on autonomy in sharing, finding, and evaluation of publicly funded research, and the provision of user-friendly access to Dutch research output. Furthermore, partnering with OpenAIRE ensures that we collaborate in a European context which is essential for sustainability, scalability and cooperation of many research services."

About

UKB is a partnership of Dutch University Libraries and The National Library of the Netherlands committed to supporting and accelerating scientific progress.

SURF is the collaborative organisation for IT in Dutch education and research, working towards improving the quality of education and research with the aid of IT innovation.

NARCIS is the main national portal for those looking for information about researchers and their work. Besides researchers, Narcis is also used by students, journalists, policy makers and people working in educational and government institutions as well as in the business sector. NARCIS will be decommissioned on July 3, 2023.

OpenAIRE is a Non-Profit Partnership established in 2018 as a legal entity, OpenAIRE A.M.K.E, to ensure a permanent open scholarly communication infrastructure to support research in Europe and beyond.

Photo: Albert Dros https://www.albertdros.com/post/2016/09/08/purple-dutch