Saskia Woutersen-Windhouwer

The ambition of the Netherlands, laid down in the National Plan Open Science, is to achieve 100% open access for academic publications. The ambition was to be achieved by 2020. However, it is to be expected that for the year 2020 between 70% and 75% of the articles will be open access. Until recently, the focus of the Netherlands has been on the gold route - open access via journals and publishers’ platforms. This is likely to be costly and it is also impossible to cover all articles and other publication types this way. Since 2015, Dutch Copyright Act has offered an alternative with the implementation of Article 25fa (also known as the ‘Taverne Amendment’), facilitating the green route, i.e. open access via (trusted) repositories. This amendment allows researchers to share short scientific works (e.g. articles and book chapters in edited collections), regardless of any restrictive guidelines from publishers. From February 2019 until August 2019 all Dutch universities participated in the pilot ‘You Share, we Take Care!’ to test how this copyright amendment could be interpreted and implemented by institutions as a policy instrument to enhance green open access and “self-archiving”. In 2020 steps were taken to scale up further implementation of the amendment. This article describes the outcomes of this pilot and shares best practices on implementation and awareness activities in the period following the pilot until early 2021, in which libraries have played an instrumental role in building trust and working on effective implementations on an institutional level. It concludes with some possible next steps for alignment, for example on a European level.

Open access to data is revolutionizing the sciences. To allow ecologists and evolutionary biologists to confidently find and use the existing data, we provide an overview of the landscape of online data infrastructures, and highlight the key points to consider when using open data. We introduce an online collaborative platform to keep a community-driven, updated list of the best sources that enable search for data in one interface. In doing so, our aim is to lower the barrier to accessing open data, and encourage its use by researchers hoping to increase the scope, reliability and value of their findings.

In Amsterdam, the libraries of the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS) cooperate closely. In this cooperation, the differences between a research university (i.c. UvA) and a university of applied sciences (i.c. AUAS) become particularly clear when we look at the aim and implementation of open access policies. The open access plan of the AUAS removes not only financial and legal barriers, but also language barriers. This makes the research output FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) to the primary target group of the product, and more importantly, it enables interaction between the AUAS and a wide audience, consisting of researchers from other disciplines, and a wide range of professionals, enterprises, civil servants, schools and citizens. In the search for co-financing by enterprises and other stakeholders, and to fulfil their valorisation requirements, these target groups are currently becoming more important for research universities as well. Here, we show what research universities can learn from the open access policy of the AUAS.