A consortium of international research institutions has launched DRIVER (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research). From today's announcement:
An international partnership has started work on a project to build a large-scale public infrastructure for research information across Europe.
The "Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research" (DRIVER) project responds to the vision that any form of scientific-content resource, including scientific/technical reports, research articles, experimental or observational data, rich media and other digital objects should be freely accessible through simple Internet-based infrastructures. Like GEANT2, the successful European network for computing resources, data storage and transport, the new DRIVER repository infrastructure will enable researchers to plug into the new knowledge base and use scientific content in a standardised, open way. The project is funded by the European Commission....
Open Access to research information is vital for researchers and helps the public appreciation and understanding of science. DRIVER will be helping countries to create networks of openly-accessible repositories for research information....
DRIVER will put a test-bed in place across Europe to assist the development of a knowledge infrastructure for the European Research Area. The project will develop over the next 18 months, building upon existing institutional repositories and networks, from countries including the Netherlands, Germany, France, Belgium and the UK. The aim is for one large-scale virtual content resource to be created to access and integrate individual repositories....
Several user services, including search, data collection, profiling and recommendation, will be implemented in the test-bed....Availability of such a basic scientific content infrastructure should encourage academic and/or non-academic service providers to build high-valued and innovative services on top of it....
The DRIVER Consortium consists of the University of Athens (Greece), Bielefeld University (Germany), Consiglio Nazionale Delle Ricerche (Italy), Stichting SURF (Netherlands), University of Nottingham (UK), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique DIS (France), University of Bath (UK), Uniwesytet Warszawski (Poland), Universiteit Gent (Belgium), and Goettingen University (Germany).
Comment. This is big. It should greatly increase the number of OA institutional repositories at European universities, tilting the balance so that universities without them will feel the need to catch up. Its test bed will demonstrate powerful new services on top of interoperable OA archiving, enticing universities to make their research output available to these services through local incentives to deposit. And it should make it much easier for public funding agencies in European countries, and the now-emerging European Research Council, to mandate OA archiving for all the research they fund.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/11/2006 04:59:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
