Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 11:43:41 +0530
From: Subbiah Arunachalam
More on DRIVER
Tracey Caldwell, Europe starts to build an Open Access information
network, Information World Review, October 17, 2006. Excerpt:
The EU is to network research papers across Europe to create a free
public information resource. The Driver project will use simple
internet-based infrastructures to make accessible scientific and technical
reports, research articles, experimental and observational data, rich
media and other digital objects.
The European Commission's research infrastructure unit will fund the
18-month project. During this time Driver (Digital Repository
Infrastructure Vision for European Research) will prepare for the future
expansion and upgrade of the infrastructure across Europe and aim to
ensure the widest possible user involvement. Ten international partners
are supporting the project.
Driver will help countries to create networks of open access (OA)
repositories. It will build on existing institutional repositories and
networks from countries including the Netherlands, Germany, France,
Belgium and the UK....
Open access commentator Peter Suber welcomed the launch: "This is big. It
should greatly increase the number of OA institutional repositories. Its
testbed will demonstrate powerful new services, enticing universities to
make their research output available to these services through local
incentives to deposit. And it should make it much easier for public
funding agencies in European countries to mandate OA archiving for all the
research they fund."
(From Peter Suber's blog)
