Open Access newsletter

Paving the way for open access.

For some years now, the University of Groningen Library has provided a publishing platform for journals edited by faculty and researchers working at or with the University of Groningen (UG). We are working to extend this service to books and conference proceedings.

Pauline Kleingeld, Professor of Philosophy (Ethics and its History), and Frank Hindriks, Associate Professor of Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, both publish actively in open access (OA). We spoke to them about their views and experiences, focusing particularly on open access in their own field of Philosophy.

The Dutch universities and publisher Elsevier have reached an agreement about the package of journals in which open access publication is possible with no additional fee.

The Dutch universities and publisher Wiley have reached an agreement which gives researchers of the universities the possibility to enjoy unlimited open access publication in approximately 1400 journals of this publisher, without paying publishing charges. Authors need to choose this open access option in the publication process. It is compliant with the NWO grant requirements.

Not only negotiation with publishers and an active involvement of researchers shape the transition towards open access. Also research funders play their part in setting clear principles for open access services. We asked our local expert Jules van Rooij how he thinks about these principles.

The University of Groningen and PeerJ , an open access biomedical publishing platform, entered an agreement.

Reliability and quality are essential for an academic journal. There are various ways of assessing this for an open access journal – one example is the Directory of Open Access Journals. Besides that there is the tool Think. Check. Submit. that provides an easy-to-use checklist that researchers can refer to when they are investigating whether a journal can be trusted. But there are even more possibilities .

For many researchers, especially in the biomedical sciences, it is important to publish their work in scientific journals with a good impact factor. If there is public funding involved, it may also be required to make the publications ‘open access’. The new version of the Journal Citation Reports makes it possible to find journals with a high impact factor that are also open access.

Geo Services (part of the Center for Information Technology) took a major step forward last autumn by launching an Open Data Portal. The portal provides access to datasets with a geographic component and an attractive presentation of the data. But the portal has more features. The Portal has since attracted considerable international interest. Govert Schoof, senior project manager Geographic Information Systems at Geo Services, gives a run-down.