Overwhelming interest in 'Cream of Science', May 17, 2005. An unsigned news story from SURF. Excerpt: 'The national Cream of Science website is a roaring success. It contains over 25,000 publications by leading Dutch scientists and researchers, available full-text for fellow academics, educational institutions and interested members of the public. Within just a day of its launch on May 10th, it registered half a million hits. The website is the showcase for leading Dutch science and research...[currently listing] the names of 206 top Dutch academics, providing worldwide access to their 41,000 publications. About 60% of these (25,000) can be accessed full text. Access to the other publications is unfortunately protected by copyright, while the full-text version of a small minority of texts is no longer recoverable....The people behind the website are overwhelmed by its success. In the words of Martin Feijen of the SURF Foundation, "We had predicted about 50,000 searches between May and December 2005, but reached this target in just a single day. This meant the site encountered an overload for a while, but we've now solved the problem."...The website's opening was attended by an international group of repositories experts. During the event six institutions signed the 'Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities'. These were NWO, the University of Amsterdam, Utrecht University, Wageningen University and Research Centre, Leiden University and JISC, SURF's counterpart in the United Kingdom. KNAW and SURF had signed the Berlin Declaration previously. Signatories intend to encourage their researchers/grant recipients to publish their work according to the principles of the open access paradigm....Some media reports, particularly those published outside of the Netherlands, suggest that the site is a declaration of war by universities against academic publishers. This is not the case. On the contrary, some publishers, such as Springer, are cooperating with the 'Cream of Science'. DARE's primary objective is to share knowledge and the site is one means of achieving this.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/18/2005 10:53:00 AM.
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.
