Dutch research institutions & Elsevier initiate Open Science partnership

The Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU), The Netherlands Federation of University Medical Centres (NFU), NWO and Elsevier have formed a novel partnership that includes publishing and reading services as well as the joint development of new open science services for disseminating and evaluating knowledge.

In December 2019, the VSNU, NFU, NWO and Elsevier signed a framework agreement. Over the past four months, all parties carefully developed this into a unique agreement.

In parallel, the Dutch research institutions established an independent expert Taskforce on responsible management of research information and data to determine the conditions and rules under which metadata of public research output can be (re)used and enriched by all public and private organizations. Following the advice of the Taskforce, a set of collaboration principles was agreed, including data ownership (researchers and/or institutions own their own research data), enduring access to data and metadata, vendor neutrality, interoperability, and institutional discretion on the use of the services.

This has led to the agreement that VSNU, NFU, NWO and Elsevier which comprises:

  1. Open Access Publishing and Reading services. This is a national deal that covers reading rights to quality, peer-reviewed content across Elsevier’s extensive portfolio of journals and supports the aim of 100% open access publishing for all members of the consortium. 95% of Dutch articles published in Elsevier journals can be made immediately open access through this agreement. The vast majority of Elsevier’s journals already offer an immediate open access option and, as part of this agreement, the company has committed to work towards immediate open access options across all remaining titles.
  2. Open Science Services for Research Intelligence and Scholarly communication. Elsevier will work with the Dutch partners to co-develop new services that help disseminate and evaluate knowledge. The parties will undertake a number of pilot projects to refine and adapt these services to meet the needs of the Dutch Research Institutions and to support the broader ambition of public engagement with science. These pilots will be conducted according to the collaboration principles as mentioned above.

Check out the full press release.

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