Frequently asked questions on Open Access Leiden

What does Open Access Leiden do?

Why is Open Access Leiden (OAL) interesting for scientists?
  • OAL contributes to a larger visibility of scientific research in relevant circles: departments, colleagues and peers, etc.
  • OAL contributes to better accessibility of scientific work for those who are interested in this.
  • OAL also contributes to easily finding relevant scientific work by others.
  • OAL contributes to rapid public distribution.
  • OAL offers comfort: scientific material only has to be supplied once. And also the technical 'preservation' of documents is guaranteed with OAL.
Which further opportunities does Open Access Leiden offer?
The infrastructure that will be set up with Open Access Leiden supplies the foundation for many possible services that can support scientists, such as:
  • To signal (new) work and the circulation thereof to internationally orientated websites and organisations.
  • To make scientific work visible through university portals and even personal homepages.
  • To facilitate conference and lustrum sites and on-demand printing of accompanying volumes.
  • To help with arranging the copyright issues.
What is meant by 'publishing' in Open Access Leiden?
'Publishing' in the traditional meaning of 'scientific publishing' means:
  1. handing in a paper at (the editors of) a magazine
  2. completing the peer review and editing process
  3. publishing the final article in a (paper) scientific magazine
  4. through this acquiring a quality stamp and a priority claim

‘Publishing’ in Open Access Leiden means:
  1. Submitting a publication in the repository of a institution for internal use by author and colleagues and (long term) preservation.
  2. Digital publishing / publishing on the web:
    - through personal homepage 
    - and/or faculty homepage 
    - and/or university homepage
    This second step is only taken when author and institution agree and the copyright of the publication permits this.
  3. Scientific publishing in a scientific magazine, and now the traditional publishing process still comes into operation.
    Step 3 is optional and is in principle not related to the digital publishing described in step 2.
What is DARE?
The DARE program was a collective initiative of all Dutch universities together with the National Library of the Netherlands, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research and SURF to make all research results digitally accessible. Using a network of repositories all Dutch scientific research material can be digitally stored and preserved. Within all institutions this is done in a similar way. Each institution maintains their own responsibility and management, without doubling up in storage and maintenance activities.

This material can then be made available in several ways and in different forms: online through personal or university homepages, existing preprint-servers or e-journals, or in traditional magazines or books, or in new forms of scientific communication, yet to be developed.

With a government funding of € 2 million over the period 2003 - 2006 DARE worked on the modernisation of the Dutch scientific information management. During this process DARE maintains contacts with international universities and organisations which concern themselves with similar activities, such as MIT, Stanford, California Institute of Technology, Humboldt University, SPARC and JISC.
What is the connection between DARE and Open Access Leiden?
DARE was the temporary (till 2006) national Dutch program and Leiden participated in this program in several ways - also through the DARC (Distributed Africana Repositories Community) and EDNA (E-Depot Nederlandse Archeologie) projects subsidized by DARE.
Go to DARC

Open Access Leiden is the complete collection of activities that Leiden University is developing concerning the institutional repository. Partly this coincides with the DARE-activities, but the program in Leiden is broader in two aspects. Firstly more services are being developed. And secondly Open Access Leiden is being set up, not as a temporary service, but as a structural, long term service. Because of this, in Leiden, we mainly speak of Open Access Leiden-activities.