Economists lead EU infonet

EU-funded NEEO initiative could offere web model for other disciplines

Economists are to get access to the recent research results of 500 economist peers from at least 16 academic institutions throughout Europe.

EU-funded project Network of European Economists Online (NEEO), an initiative of a consortium of academic libraries, began in September to work on portal access to the repositories of the 16 institutions.

Peter Williams, subject librarian for economics and political science at UCL, one of the participating institutions, said that if successful (the target is 50,000 references by 2010), the model could be transferable to other disciplines. He said the project continued the tradition of open access in the economics academic community.

The NEEO project is intended to be an opportunity to consider the way new business models in scholarly communication could be developed. It plans to include as many data sets as possible. “This is an EU project with various targets, and datasets is one we have to meet,” said Williams.

Librarians are leading the project. “Libraries are in close communication with the researchers, so they are at the heart of content production, preservation, classification and dissemination,” said Hans Geleijnse, director of library and IT services at Tilburg University and project director. “This is all very in line with what libraries have always done, but in the web environment research libraries have to focus more than ever on the information that our their institutions are producing on a day-by-day basis.”

www.nereus4economics.info