The National Research Environment
There are 13 research universities in the Netherlands, organised in the VSNU (Association of Universities in the Netherlands). 27 percent of all research is done on these universities. In addition there are several research institutes: 15 hosted by KNAW (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences), 11 by NWO, 14 by TNO, 8 technical Top Institutes and 4 societal Top Institutes. The 40 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.
Major research funders
In addition to direct funding by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science research is also funded by two organisations:
- the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) – With effect from 1 December 2015, NWO has tightened the conditions in the Regulation on Granting with respect to Open Access. The phrase ‘accessible to the public as quickly as possible’ has become ‘immediate Open Access at the moment of publication’.
- the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) – 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. The KNAW does not have an OA mandate.
EC research funding
Dutch researchers are successful in obtaining funding from EU bodies. Over 1,200 Dutch organizations participated successfully in FP7 projects (2007-2013). Their succes rate of 23% (of proposals accepted) is one of the highest in Europe.Complete details on research from the Netherlands funded by FP7 can be found on the website of Netherlands Enterprise Agency (in Dutch).
Open Access and Repositories
There is widespread awareness of Open Access in the Netherlands. Since 2005 all Dutch universities, the HBO-raad (Netherlands Association of Universities of Applied Sciences), the KNAW, NWO, the Royal Library and SURF have signed the Berlin Declaration.
DANS, an institute of KNAW and NWO, gives through the national portal NARCIS, access to (open access) publications from all the Dutch universities, KNAW, NWO, and a number of research institutes; access to datasets of some data archives; and to descriptions of research projects, institutes and researchers.
The national website about Open Access, www.openaccess.nl, gives information about open access publishing for various stakeholders.
Open Access projects and initiatives
In 2009 the rectors of the Dutch universities have discussed ways of stimulating Open Access. In September 2010 the rector of the Erasmus University Rotterdam announced that Open Access publishing will be mandatory for EUR staff as of January 2011. At this moment three universities have budgets reserved for Open Access publishing: Delft University of Technology, Twente and Utrecht University. Other universities are developing similar policies.
The VSNU has reached agreement with Springer that in 2010 all articles by Dutch researchers in Springer journals will be made available Open Access, subject to the author's approval.
The costs and benefits of alternative ways of scientific publishing were investigated by professor John Houghton, under the authority of SURFfoundation, a former part of SURF, Collaborative organisation for ICT in Dutch education and research. The results have been published in Costs and Benefits of Research Communication: The Dutch Situation.
Open Access repositories
The Netherlands is one of the leaders in the development of research repositories. All Dutch research universities have one or more repositories. An overview of the Dutch scholarly repositories can be found on the NARCIS website. In 2016 in the European repository ranking the Dutch repositories are doing well, with Utrecht University and the University of Groningen, in 6th and 19th position respectively.
Central access for these repositories is provided by the portal of NARCIS, hosted by Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS). NARCIS not only offers access to 485,000 open access publications, but it also provides the main entrance to datasets, restricted access publications, Dutch research descriptions, experts and organisations.
At 9 universities the depositing of doctoral theses in the institutional repository is mandatory; on average 84% of the thesis output of the universities is covered. The NARCIS site provides access to 71,000 Open Access doctoral e-theses.
The universities of applied sciences work together in collecting the materials deposited in their repositories and presenting these through one portal, the HBO-kennisbank. This portal now provides open access to over 31,000 research outputs, educational materials and student theses.
Open Access publishing
35 scientific journals from the Netherlands are listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (www.doaj.org). Igitur, Utrecht Publishing and Archiving Services is one of the main publishers of OA journals. Amsterdam University Press is primary partner in the OAPEN project, concerned with the Open Access publishing of humanities and social sciences monographs.
Since 2014 national licenses with academic publishers are strongly connected with open access.
The renewal of what is known as the ‘big deal’ 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. These deals run for 3 to 5 years. Negotiations will be taking place with several large publishers soon about the renewal of those contracts. 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). Koen Becking (Tilburg University) and Gerard Meijer (Radboud University Nijmegen) and Jaap Winter (VU University Amsterdam) have been appointed the lead advisors for the negotiations by the VSNU’s General Board.
An agreement for 2015-2016 has been made with Springer. This means that articles from corresponding authors associated with VSNU or NFU (Netherlands Federation of University Medical Centres) institutions will be published as open access and authors will not be charged. Payment will be made for the publication of articles, with institutions maintaining access to all Springer journals. The agreement applies to around 1,500 journals within the Springer OpenChoice programme. Titles published by Learned Societies, BioMedCentral and SpringerOpen are excluded. The agreement applies to all articles accepted from 1 January 2015. In the new workflow, Springer will ask authors to indicate which institution they are associated with. Springer and the library of the relevant institution will verify this information. This step will take place during the production process for the article and will not take up any extra time. Springer has set up a special site for this.
For more information please read the frequently asked questions on open access and the fact sheet.
Open Access organisations and groups
An important organisation for the promotion of Open Access in the Netherlands is SURF, the collaborative organisation for research universities, research institutes and universities of applied sciences in the Netherlands. The goal of the SURFshare programme was to create a common infrastructure that will facilitate access to research information and make it possible for researchers to share scientific and scholarly information. The programme ran from 2008 to 2011 and aims to work with all the Dutch universities – both research universities and “universities of applied sciences”– the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) towards optimising the sharing of research results using the latest advances in ICT. Their publication Nederland loopt warm voor Open Access (‘The Netherlands are sold on Open Access’ – available online, only in Dutch) gives an overview of the Dutch status quo after the Open Access year 2009.
The Netherlands held the Presidency of the Council of the European Union from January to June 2016. In April 2016 a conference on Open Science was held in Amsterdam. In the context of this conference the Academy published "Opening the book on open access" containing interviews with reserachers about open access publishing.
All information on Open Access in the Netherlands can be found on www.openaccess.nl.
Contributors Contact Details
TU Delft (Just de Leeuwe) for open access publications and Data Archiving and Networked Services - DANS (Elly Dijk) for reserach data are NOADs for the Netherlands.