Can I reuse research data? The answer according to Dutch law

A new report has just been published on the legal situation regarding the reuse of research data, according to Dutch law. This report was commissioned by SURF and has been written by CIER. The report (in Dutch) can be found here.

Of course this is quite complicated legal stuff, so to keep it simple there are a few standard questions which have been answered. This straightforward explanation can be found here.
(Don't forget to read the disclaimer though)

Great holiday in Slovenia

I have just returned from a great holiday in Slovenia. I was very impressed by the beautiful landscapes: mountains, waterfalls, lakes and hills. Ljubljana is a small but very attractive and friendly capital. The mediterranean was hot but beautiful. Piran was very pretty, yet rather busy. But most of all I was impressed by the original Karst: rills, gulleys, Dolines, huge sinkholes, natural bridges, a veeery large Polje and of course the caves. I was especially impressed by the huge canyon in the Skocjan cave.

A golden road with a green lining?

As more and more organisations are realising the benefits of open access a discussion is still taking place on the road to take to Open Access. I do wonder where we will go? Perhaps there will not be two separate roads, Green and Gold. Perhaps the future is Gold OA, if enough publishers will adopt this model. This would certainly make it a lot easier for researchers, rather than having to also add their publication to a repository. A number of publishers are past experimenting on switching their business model to earning their income from article processing costs. It would be helpful if the research funders mandate Open Access to all their funded research. This is now taking place, as the NIH, Welcome trust started off and now also EUROHORC and ESF have taken position.

However (Institutional) Repositories will probably continue to exist. Not all materials are published in journals (take grey literature, data and learning materials for instance). However: nobody wants to refer to the same publication in different places. The journal is where the articles are and where traffic and publicity goes to.

Institutional Repositories can still perform a valuable function for archiving reasons and can form a place to collect all the research materials together. The questions remains who will provide aggregations which collect usage statistics and citation scores and will provide persistent identifiers.

Comparison of Costs and Benefits of Open Access for UK, Netherlands and Denmark

The Houghton studies on the costs and benefits of Open Access from the UK (commissioned by JISC), the Netherlands (commissioned by SURF) and Denmark (commissoned by DEFF) were compared in a study commissioned by Knowledge Exchange. Noticeably in all three countries benefits can be achieved by switching to an open access model. The benefits are different in the three countries though, these are mainly due to difference in scale between the three countries and how the education is organised in the three countries.

On the 22 June 2009 this combined report was discussed in a seminar with various members of the European commission and other European bodies present. At this seminar not only the report was presented, but responses from various stakeholders and implications for funders were also discussed. Two speakers from the European commission gave a presentation on the activities they are undertaking in the field of Open Access.

For the details please see : http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/Default.aspx?ID=316
The photographs of the seminar can be seen at: http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/Default.aspx?ID=321

Video on the archiving of enhanced publications

The video below was created as a part of the European DRIVER II project. In this animation created by Eugene Durr for the royal library and Delft University you can see how the archiving of enhanced publications is organised. The main challenge is to archive the text, the data and the relationship between these two quite different files.
You might recognise the voice over ;-)
See: http://www.surfmedia.nl/app/video/D5CHvHq2d27nAnHDhOrbxaOo/play?format_id=GyhlyRi8C5t5dzDRwit19kDf&mode=object