Stichting SURF

Updated on 23 February 2015

SURFfoundation SURF is the collaborative organisation for higher education institutions and research institutes aimed at breakthrough innovations in ICT. SURF provides the foundation for the excellence of higher education and research in the Netherlands. SURF collaborates with a number of partners abroad to share knowledge and to profit from advantages of scale. The results that SURF achieves are also guiding examples in an international setting. SURF foundation is the initiator for ICT driven innovation in higher education and research. SURF initiates, guides and stimulates ICT innovation through sharing knowledge and partnerships.

SURF has coordinated the DARE programme, with resulted in DAREnet, a network linking the institutional repositories set up at all Dutch universities and various related institutions. DAREnet has grown out to a national science portal NARCIS (www.narcis.nl) offering a single access point to the local digital collections. In the new SURFshare program SURF intends to make accessible not only the final publications but also the underlying datasets and intermediate results, such as visualisations or algorithms.

DAREnet’s success has inspired the European network of repositories, DRIVER (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research). SURF plays the role of a forerunner in this European project, responsible for the state-of-the-art study, data model and demonstrators, and the technology watch.

SURF plays a key role in development of Guidelines for set up of open access repositories and deposit content in the institutional repositories. These Guidelines form the basis of harvesting mechanisms in synergy between PEER and DRIVER projects. This will have benefits for both projects, with PEER populating DRIVER repositories and DRIVER facilitating access for the user community. SURF also supports the Helpdesk function to establish a workflow for repository ingest.

Contact Persons

Marjan Vernooy
Lilian van der Vaart