Université de Liège - L'expérience de l'ULg en Open Access s'exporte

“This May 10, the University of Liège is exporting its know-how! It is signing with the University of Luxemburg a joint programme agreement so that the latter can create its own academic and scientific research publications online repository based on the success, remarkable and widely remarked, of that designed by the ULg. The background to this agreement is the Open Access movement which, born some fifteen years ago, aims at allowing the widest possible diffusion of academic and scientific information, without any barrier, economic or otherwise, in such a way as to facilitate the dissemination of Knowledge. The ULg and its Rector Bernard Rentier are playing a pioneering role in Europe in the promotion of Open Access. More and more universities throughout the world are adopting the principles of Open Access, which is taking concrete shape in particular through the creation of online institutional repositories, which are in a way large virtual libraries which index all the publications written by the researchers in each university and which give access to their contents, whilst respecting authors’ rights at the same time. At the ULg this repository has been named ORBi (Open Repository and Bibliography). At present it has 78,803 references for the publications by ULg researchers, with 47,638 with a reference to the integral text. Since September 2008, 1,786,263 references have been viewed by internet researchers throughout the entire world, with 784,387 documents downloaded. A digilibrary such as ORBi is a tremendous research and information consultation tool, as well as an online shop window which increases the international visibility of the ULg’s research publications. The University of Luxemburg will now work with the ULg’s teams in order to set up its own institutional repository: ORBilu