Darenet

DAREnet stands for Digital Academic Repositories and is an initiative by the Dutch organisation Surf. The DARE programme is a joint initiative by the Dutch universities and the National Library of the Netherlands, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO) with the aim to store the results of all Dutch research in a network of so-called repositories, thus facilitating access to them. DAREnet is now integrated into the portal www.narcis.info.

"Cream of Science" initiative

In May 2005 DARE started the Cream of Science open access project with an online library of 25.000 publications from 200 prominent Dutch scientists. Because some publishers have more stringent copyright restrictions (notably Reed Elsevier) than others, free online access is limited to approximately 60% of the library content. The main disadvantage of the database is that free online accessibility is not listed for each publication and will only become apparent when a click-through is attempted. In the final stage of the DARE programme an ambitious project called HunDAREd thousand was started. The aim was to upload 100,000 full-text objects into DAREnet within a year. The focus of this project was on the doctoral theses of young scholars. The aim of this "Promise of Science" project was to set up a national doctoral e-thesis gateway and populate it with 10,000 full-text e-theses before the end of 2006. The total annual production of doctoral theses in the Netherlands is around 2,500. Promise of Science was launched in September 2006 and in January 2007 DAREnet also achieved DARE’s final goal, the HunDAREd thousand project. At the time DAREnet contained a total of 103,429 objects.

Structure

On 1 January 2007, at the completion of the DARE programme, KNAW Research Information took over responsibility for the DAREnet portal with the intention to integrate DAREnet with the Dutch Research Database (NOD) into the scientific portal NARCIS. This then took place on 2 June 2008. At the moment (June 2010), NARCIS is divided into different sections:

• The main NARCIS section: Search for data on researchers (expertise), research organisations and current (or recently concluded) research projects at all Dutch universities and research institutes. One can also search the datasets that make up the DANS Electronic Archiving System (EASY). This section also gives you access to the full-text publications in DAREnet.

NARCIS is further divided into sub-sections:

• Publications: Search in the Open and Closed Access publications of the Dutch universities, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, and other research institutions (530,000).
• Open Access: Search exclusively for full-text publications from all Dutch universities, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, and other research institutions (235,000).
• Doctoral theses: The Promise of Science provides access to approximately 33,700 full-text doctoral theses from all Dutch universities.
• Research: Search for information about 48,000 current and concluded research projects and programmes of the Dutch universities and research institutes.
• Organisations: One can find information about almost 3,000 research organisations in the Netherlands.
• People: NARCIS gives information about 40,000 researchers (including expertise, professors) in the Netherlands.
• Datasets: NARCIS gives access to information about more than 15,000 datasets of the institute DANS.

In addition to these four sections, NARCIS is updated every hour with the latest science news flashes from various sources, including universities and other academic information providers (Intermediair, Science Guide and Elsevier). An RSS-feed function and NARCIS widgets are also available.

NARCIS was developed by the KNAW and NWO, with assistance from SURFfoundation, the key ICT partnership in higher education and research. Plans are to continue expanding NARCIS in the years ahead. NARCIS's content is created in close cooperation with Dutch scientific and scholarly institutions.

External links

• NARCIS
• KNAW
• SURFfoundation
• NWO
• DANS