Dutch Open Access monitor is renewed

The national partnership of university libraries and the National Library of the Netherlands, UKB, monitors the peer-reviewed articles that appear in open access. The results are reported annually by the Universities of the Netherlands (UNL) to the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. The developments with regard to open access publishing are moving fast. Since 2016, a framework for this has been used, which is now being renewed for even more comprehensive monitoring.

Measuring more and better

It is important to choose the right policy principles and to motivate scientists to share their publications worldwide without barriers. The new framework anticipates further automation. It also includes a number of developments that have come into play in recent years.

• More and more books, book chapters, conference papers and other publication types are published in open access. These publication types are part of the national open access ambitions.
• The Dutch Copyright Act offers an additional possibility to publish short works of science in open access in the university repositories, six months after the first online publication. Work is being done on this in the project "You share, we take care!" (the green route). The various ways in which publications become open access will soon become clear in the monitoring.
• Scientists connected to the NWO, KNAW and other non-profit knowledge institutions are also increasingly publishing in open access.

These and other important issues will be included in the monitoring framework that is currently being developed by the UKB working group on OA monitoring, in which various universities and research institutions cooperate. This will be done on the basis of the approved advisory report (in Dutch). It is not done overnight. Various consultation rounds ensure a broad input from different perspectives. The intention is to measure more flexibly and efficiently, and to include new data sources.

What next?

The Working Group on OA Monitoring will start working on the practical implementation of the recommendations. All stakeholders will be involved in the further design of the new monitor. 2022 is a transition year. The traditional local measurements will still be carried out as in previous years. In the autumn, a prototype of the new Open Access monitoring will be delivered. The new monitoring will be performed centrally. The first evaluation will take place at the end of the first quarter of 2023.

More information

Please visit the UKB website (in Dutch).