The University of Luxembourg announced that it will cooperate with the University of Liège to expand the open access offer of ORBi. Following the heated debate surrounding open access which put publisher Elsevier at the center, sentiment increasingly shifts in favor of making research freely available. Only recently, Harvard Library sent out a memo to its researchers urging them to avoid publishing in for-profit journals.
Full press statement by University of Luxembourg
The University has announced its intent to actively participate in the Open Access initiative, a worldwide movement aiming to make scholarly publications freely and openly available to anyone via the Internet.
As defined in the Budapest (2002), Bethesda (2003) and Berlin (2003) declarations on Open Access, OA is the immediate, online, free availability of research outputs without any restrictions on use commonly imposed by publisher copyright agreements.
Through the signature of a collaboration agreement with the University of Liège (ULg), the University of Luxembourg hopes to inspire its researchers to publish in Open Access in order to attain the success that the ULg has achieved with ORBi , its digital repository: in less than 6 years, researchers at ULg have entered over 80,000 references, 48265 or 60% with full-text.
As stated in 2011 by Bernard Rentier, Rector of ULg: "Today ORBi is the most active institutional repository of its type in the world". For the month of March 2012 alone, ORBi has registered more than 104,000 consultations and more than 48,000 publication downloads.
This collaboration agreement will, through the transfer of knowledge and experience, strengthen the ties between the Universities, both partners in the University of the Greater Region project. It will, above all, provide the University of Luxembourg with its own digital repository, ORBi lu.
Finding results of research via Google
The benefits of such a tool are numerous. Besides the preservation aspects, it will increase access to what UL researchers are doing by making their scientific work more visible and more widely read and used. By putting in place its own repository, ORBi lu , the University of Luxembourg hopes to significantly increase the worldwide impact of its scientific production and, in particular, to increase the number of citations of articles published by its researchers. This increased visibility will open up, as well, new partnering opportunities. Once ORBi lu is in place - planned for the first quarter 2013 - the results of research performed at the University of Luxembourg will be available via a simple Google search.