chem-bla-ics: On Open Access in The Netherlands
pontika.nancy@gmail.com's bookmarks 2014-11-03
Summary:
"Yesterday, I received a letter from the Association of Universities The Netherlands (VSNU, @deVSNU) about Open Access. The Netherlands is for research a very interesting country: it's small, meaning we have few resources to establish and maintain high profile centers, we also believe strong education benefits from distribution, so we we have many good universities, rather than a few excelling universities. Mind you, this clouds that we absolutely do have excelling research institutes and research groups; they just are not concentrated in one university. Another important aspect is that all those Dutch universities are expected to compete which each other for funding. As a result I have experience rather interesting collaborations between universities. That's a downside of a small country: everyone knows each other, often in way to much detail. But my point is that the Dutch can be rather conservative. That kills innovation, and is in my opinion a key reason why we are not breaking into the top 50 of rankings, more than concentration. Concentration of funding in Top research institutes has not been extensively evaluated, but I think the efficiency is not proven higher than previous funding approaches. Anyway, this letter I received is part of their Open Access program. Here too, the Dutch universities are conservative (well, relatively from my views, at least). Now, the Open Access debate is not so interesting, because it primarily ends up about who pays who (boring) and whether we should go gold or green (besides the point, see below), and, sadly, here too many people think about who pays who again (still boring). Therefore, giving the outlined importance and impact of Dutch research, I found it relevant to post about the progress of Open Access in my small country. The letter is available in English ..."