[CAnet - news] Dutch academics declare research free-for-all

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[Some excerpts from original article -- BSA]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/05/11/open_access_research/

 Dutch academics declare research free-for-all

Scientists from all major Dutch universities officially launched a website
on Tuesday where all their research material can be accessed for free.
Interested parties can get hold of a total of 47,000 digital documents from
16 institutions the Digital Academic Repositories. No other nation in the
world offers such easy access to its complete academic research output in
digital form, the researchers claim. Obviously, commercial publishers are
not amused.

DAREnet was already launched about a year ago, but for demonstration
purposes only. The €2m DARE programme - a joint initiative by all the Dutch
universities, the National Library of the Netherlands, the Royal Netherlands
Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Netherlands Organisation for
Scientific Research (NWO) - harvests all digital available material from
local repositories, making it fully searchable. Aside from bibliographical
information, the content can be full text, or even audio and video files.

The initiative is clearly not welcomed by commercial scientific publishers
such as Elsevier Science. Increasingly, universities complain about the high
cost of scientific journals and many argue that the research results should
be distributed freely or at significantly less cost to library subscribers.

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