Europe starts to build an Open Access information network

The EU is to network research papers across Europe to create a free public information resource.

The Driver project will use simple internet-based infrastructures to make accessible scientific and technical reports, research articles, experimental and observational data, rich media and other digital objects.

The European Commission’s research infrastructure unit will fund the 18-month project. During this time Driver (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research) will prepare for the future expansion and upgrade of the infrastructure across Europe and aim to ensure the widest possible user involvement. Ten international partners are supporting the project.

Driver will help countries to create networks of open access (OA) repositories. It will build on existing institutional repositories and networks from countries including the Netherlands, Germany, France, Belgium and the UK.

The European Commission hopes that the availability of such a basic scientific content infrastructure will encourage academic and non-academic service providers to build high-valued and innovative services on top.

Open access commentator Peter Suber welcomed the launch: “This is big. It should greatly increase the number of OA institutional repositories. Its testbed will demonstrate powerful new services, enticing universities to make their research output available to these services through local incentives to deposit. And it should make it much easier for public funding agencies in European countries to mandate OA archiving for all the research they fund.”

Like this story? Spread the news by clicking below:

 del.icio.us     Digg this     reddit!