Faculty of Science celebrates 500,000th open access publication of NARCIS
The Faculty of Science celebrated the 500,000th open access publication in NARCIS with all employees who help making Leiden Science publications open access. During this event the importance of open access was stressed, for both the Faculty and the researcher.
Access to scientific information
The National Academic Research and Collaborations Information System (NARCIS) is the main national portal for those looking for information about researchers and their work. NARCIS provides access to scientific information, including open access publications from the repositories of all the Dutch universities.
Open access since 1597
The Leiden Repository contributed around 19,000 publications, of which the thesis of Hugo de Groot from 1597 is the oldest. Strikingly, the number of open access publications by Leiden Observatory in 2016 almost equalled 0.1 percent of the milestone – almost 500 publications. This number of publications may grow significantly in the coming years, as research articles replace dissertations as the most important source of open access publications. Leiden researchers can help by publishing directly in open access. There are over 7,000 high ranking journals in which researchers can publish open access without additional costs. Researchers can have a look at the possibilities, or browse the interactive journal list.
Thank you cake
To celebrate the 500.000th Open Access publication, NARCIS sent a cake to all contributing organisations. The Faculty of Science shared the cake with all its employees who helped to make research open access. There was a special thanks to Ellie van Rijsewijk-Salman, who helped the project greatly.
More visibility and citations
During the meeting, policy maker Ron van Veen held a speech on behalf of the Board of the Faculty of Science. ‘The Board greatly values publishing open access. The main reason is that it increases the visibility of our research. By publishing open access, we show the public what important work we do with our fundings. An additional advantage is that open access publications are cited more often, so our researchers also profit from publishing open access’, said Van Veen.
Lucris and NARCIS
Rutger de Jong is Subject Librarian at Leiden University Libraries and agrees with Van Veen: ‘Open access leads to an increased visibility of the research of our scientists, improves Leiden University’s ranking and helps the researchers to comply with funder requirements.’ He explained the process of publishing open access: ‘At this University, we use the system Lucris to enter all our research output in the Leiden Repository. We then make the publications accessible for open access publication in NARCIS.
The Faculty of Science is the largest contributor to the Leiden Repository. The preliminary results for 2016 state that more than half of the Faculty of Science's publications (659 out of 1215) has an open access version attached that is directly accessible without embargo.