Chapter/Belgium/Stories/OpenAccess

E-Prints
University Libraries worldwide are participating in the Open Access movement to provide immediate, online, free availability of research outputs without restrictions on use commonly imposed by publisher copyright agreements. Traditionally subject e-print repositories were set up in the 90's where researchers could exchange preprints. Examples of such services were:


 * arXiv.org http://arxiv.org/ - free access to research papers from physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance and statistics.
 * RePEc http://repec.org/ - research papers in economics
 * Cogprint http://cogprints.org/ - psychology, neuroscience, and Llnguistics, and many areas of computer science

In October 1999 Herbert Van de Sompel of Ghent University was working Los Alamos National Laboratory and called a meeting to address the interoperability issues of all these e-print servers and digital repositories. This resulted in the Open Archives Initiative [OAI]which attempts to build a "low-barrier interoperability framework" for archives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Archives_Initiative. The OAI technical infrastructure is now implemented in thousands of e-print repositories world wide.

In the same year libraries got involved into the open access publishing when due to the so called serial criss it became virtually impossible for libraries to keep up with their journal subscriptions. Due to stark rising prices, all but the richest of institutions are obliged to cut the amount of journals they are subscribed to, or to engage in long and tiresome negotiations with major publishers to obtain a discount or waiver (the so-called 'big deals') Open Access publishing allows libraries that are working on a small budget to obtain and disseminate all the relevant publications without overbearing their financial means. http://www.openaccess.be/default.aspx?PageId=752.

Virtually every university runs now one or more e-print repositories. The ROAR service http://roar.eprints.org/ provide a registry of all open access repositories world wide. In Belgium there are 29 of such repositories http://roar.eprints.org/cgi/roar_search/advanced?location_country=be&software=&type=&order=-recordcount%2F-date such as:


 * University of Ghent UGent Institutional Archive http://biblio.ugent.be
 * ORBi - Open Repository and Bibliography (Liege) http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/

All these e-print repositories not only provide free access to research papers but also implement the OAI-PMH protocol http://www.openarchives.org/pmh/ to get access to machine readable metadata using REST (see: http://biblio.ugent.be/input/home?func=developer for examples of such services).

Open Bibliography
Librarians are, in general, very favorable to the principles of Open Access. But surprisingly few libraries have so far set free the data they produce themselves. CERN was the first scientific library in the world to provide access to the bibliographic book records, held in its library catalog, to be freely downloaded by any third party http://library.web.cern.ch/library/Library/bookdata.html. Soon other libraries followed. In Belgium Ghent University Library provides weekly exports of the complete catalog using an Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL) http://search.ugent.be/meercat/x/api_nl.html.

Awareness
Libraries provide not only open data and open bibliographies but also create the necessary infrastructure to promote and disseminate open access. Examples of such initiatives are:


 * Open Access .BE http://www.openaccess.be/ - news and information on open access in Belgium
 * Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities http://oa.mpg.de/lang/en-uk/berlin-prozess/berliner-erklarung/ - signed by all Belgian universities on February 13 2007
 * Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe http://www.openaire.eu - connecting 295 e-print repositories in Europe using grid computing
 * SPARC Europe http://www.sparceurope.org/ - alliance of European research libraries, library organisations and research institutions promoting open access
 * Directory of Open Access Journals http://www.doaj.org/ - catalog of open access journals