Benelux universities opt for open access

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15 mei 2012 | The Universities of Luxembourg and Liège join forces to expand their open access project ORBi. With more than 100.000 consultations per month it is the most active digital repository of its kind, Bernard Rentier of Liège University comments. Will other institutes follow suit?

The University of Luxembourg announced that it will cooperatewith the University of Liège to expand the open access offer of ORBi. Followingthe heated debate surrounding open access which putpublisher Elsevier at the center, sentiment increasingly shifts infavor of making research freely available. Only recently, HarvardLibrary sent out a memo to its researchers urging them to avoidpublishing in for-profit journals.

Full press statement by University ofLuxembourg

The University has announced its intent to actively participatein the Open Access initiative, a worldwide movement aiming to makescholarly publications freely and openly available to anyone viathe 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 onuse commonly imposed by publisher copyright agreements.

Through the signature of a collaboration agreement with theUniversity of Liège (ULg), the University of Luxembourg hopes toinspire its researchers to publish in Open Access in order toattain the success that the ULg has achieved with ORBi , itsdigital repository: in less than 6 years, researchers at ULg haveentered over 80,000 references, 48265 or 60% withfull-text.

As stated in 2011 by Bernard Rentier, Rector of ULg: “Today ORBi isthe most active institutional repository of its type in the world”.For the month of March 2012 alone, ORBi has registered more than104,000 consultations and more than 48,000 publicationdownloads.

This collaboration agreement will, through the transfer ofknowledge and experience, strengthen the ties between theUniversities, both partners in the University of the Greater Regionproject.  It will, above all, provide the University ofLuxembourg with its own digital repository, ORBi ^lu.

Finding results of research via Google

The benefits of such a tool are numerous. Besides thepreservation aspects, it will increase access to what ULresearchers are doing by making their scientific work more visibleand more widely read and used.  By putting in place its ownrepository, ORBi ^lu , the University of Luxembourg hopesto significantly increase the worldwide impact of its scientificproduction and, in particular, to increase the number of citationsof articles published by its researchers. This increased visibilitywill 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 Luxembourgwill be available via a simple Google search.