The Dutch DARE program launched its Cream of Science project on Wednesday. Here's an excerpt from Henk Ellermann's description of it: 'Initiated and managed by DARE each Dutch university and a small number of other organizations selected at least ten prominent researchers. For each author a list of publications was compiled and put online. A relative large number of freely available full texts were collected too and can be downloaded from the cream of science website. The publications are stored in the individual repositories of the dutch universities and, following the OAI model, are harvested for display on this central, and national, website. The website is of course a service to the scientists and scholars themselves but is also very important for "selling" the repositories. First of all it has almost doubled the number of publications available from Dutch repositories. Secondly, the publications available are of relatively high quality in terms of their scientific and scholarly content. The latter is important because many still think that repositories are filled with second rate material, an incorrect prejudice in fact, but a persistent one. The opening was such a success that the cream of science server was not able to handle all visitors. More than 500 000 requests within ten hours were too much for the webserver.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/13/2005 09:09:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
