Leo Waaijers
Platform Manager, ICT and Research
SURF Foundation
The Digital Academic Repositories (DARE) is a joint initiative by the Dutch universities, which facilitates digital access to the results of their research. Now that all DARE repositories are operational, harvested for instance by DAREnet (www.darenet.nl) and Yahoo, and more than 20 services are ready or under construction, it is time to look ahead. Libraries have been the drivers thus far, but to ensure a stream of content into the repositories and to guarantee that repositories and services are sustainable after 2006, when the DARE Program comes to an end, authors and their institutes must be involved. Several actions are being undertaken, which, basically, aim at satisfying a need for visibility, ease of use, and continued access to the research output of both scientists and their institutes. We will build a national window featuring the complete production of about 150 top scientists, 10 from each university. A link between the repositories and the local research management systems will reduce the administrative burden of writing bibliographic records and loading digital objects, especially as we are building on top of that an automated personal web page generator. Finally, a link to the e-Depot of the National Library will guarantee the perpetual preservation and accessibility of the deposited material.
While working on these issues we received a request from Elsevier requesting permission for indexing and presenting the content of the DARE repositories through their Scirus search engine, which we will also discuss.