Bas Savenije

Director General of the National Library of the Netherlands.

A plea for the ‘green road’ to free availability of the results of scientific/scholarly research

My position is well known: the results of publicly financed research should be publicly accessible. But I am still happy to explain.

Researchers publish their results in scientific/scholarly journals, which are traditionally financed from subscriptions. The relatively high cost of subscribing means that it is mainly scientific/scholarly libraries that in fact take out subscriptions to such journals, or a licence for the digital version. Employees and students within the associated university community then have access to the digital version from their workplace or from home. For other people, access is much more difficult and also expensive. That is a problem, for example where medical information is concerned. In the United Kingdom, the big financier of medical research, the Wellcome Trust, now requires that publications about research that it has financed should be available to all. The European Commission is also running a pilot project in which the results of certain scientific/scholarly research are made available via Open Access.

Last August, I was quoted about this matter in an article in the NRC Handelsblad newspaper. The letters to the editor that then followed, and the newspaper’s editorial, showed that there are doubts about whether this is financially feasible. But please believe me: I am capable of writing a complicated story about the transition from a subscription model to an Open Access model for scientific/scholarly publications. And I can also work out the financial consequences of this ‘golden road’.

But I would rather talk about the ‘green road’, which works like this:

Virtually every European university has an institutional repository, in other words a digital archive in which the content of its scientific/scholarly publications is stored and as far as possible made available by means of Open Access. In the Netherlands, the DARE project has allowed the universities to create a volume of almost 200,000 open access articles. The National Library of the Netherlands (KB) ensures permanent storage of the publications from the repositories by placing them in its eDepot. Storing an article in a repository therefore means that it can be made available to everyone without additional charges.

Various European universities even make it obligatory for their researchers to upload their publication to the institution’s repository. Bodies that finance research – in the Netherlands the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), for example – could make it obligatory for results to be uploaded to the institution’s repository as a precondition for financing the research. This should preferably be the publisher’s version of the research results, but if the publisher prohibits that from being done, one can upload the author’s final version instead. At the request of the author or publisher, there could be an embargo period (‘moving wall’) before the work became available.

I think that this is an excellent, sustainable way of making the results of publicly financed research available at no additional cost. As director of the National Library of the Netherlands, I am doing everything possible to publicise this ‘green road’ and the role of the National Library.