How do you DARE? Lessons learned from the DARE Programme in the Netherlands

Abstract

DARE is the acronym for Digital Academic Repositories. The DARE Programme is a combined initiative of all Dutch universities, The National Library, The Academy of Sciences and the Dutch Science Foundation over the period 2003 - 2006. It aims at better access to the results of academic research. Better here means cheaper and quicker without erosion of quality standards and caring for retrievability and custody. The infrastructure is a network of OAI compliant institutional repositories that preserve academic publications and research data. Over 20 projects are working on, or offer already, services in the fields of knowledge dissemination, scholarly communication and educational curricula. The Programme is coordinated by SURF. Both nationally and internationally it has a high profile. As a first national service DAREnet was born January 27, 2004, a milestone in the Dutch scientific information ecology (http://www.darenet.nl/). DAREnet gives access to the openly accessible content of the Dutch academic repositories and is searchable per institute, discipline and document type. On May 10, 2005, a second 'child' was born, the Cream of Science site (http://www.creamofscience.org). The site features the complete oeuvre of 207 Dutch top scientists. It has over 40.000 records, 60% of which give direct access to the full text documents. Currently, the project "hunDAREd thousand" is absorbing all our energy. It aims at 100.000 new publications in DAREnet in the final year of the Programme. A subset of 10.000 doctoral theses will be shown in a separate view under the name Promise of Science.