The National Library of the Netherlands (Koninklijke Bibliotheek) announced today that it will preserve the OA repositories in the country's Darenet network. The details are in Dutch, but Wouter Gerritsma has posted a short English-language summary on his blog:
Today it was announced that electronic documents deposited in the repositories of Dutch universities, connected through Darenet, will be curated by the National Library of the Netherlands. This announcement (in Dutch) is a new compelling argument for the libraries who operate the individual repositories to convince researchers to deposit more of their work in these repositories.
With the leading position of the National Library in the field of sustainability archiving or curating electronic material we have one of the best opportunities to keep these copies accessible for future generations. If that is not going to convince them....
Comment. It's important that these repositories will be preserved, important that the burden will be borne by a well-funded, well-respected library, and important that the repositories themselves will be freed to focus on removing access barriers to the nation's research output.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/28/2006 09:07:00 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.
