9. The DRIVER Project: The Socio-economic Benefits of a European Scientific Commons
The European DRIVER project (the Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research) builds a repository infrastructure combined with a search portal for open access (OA) European scientific communication. The goal is to aggregate all OA materials into one knowledge infrastructure or scientific commons, with collections, scientific communities and customized portals. For the infrastructure, the DRIVER open source software package D-NET v.1.0 (http://www.driverrepository.eu/index.php/D-NET_release) has been developed. The DRIVER project chose to include only open access full-text materials, which means it does not retrieve reference-only materials, in order to promote the OA movement with readers and authors.
Specific studies about copyright for digital repositories have been issued, and the DRIVER project partners keep advocating an OA mandate for all the publications funded by the European Commission (EC), in parallel with geographically-based or subject-based mandates.[1] The last couple of years have seen a rise in “self-archiving” mandates issued by major research funders and
- ↑ See Wilma Mossink, “Intellectual Property Rights”, in A DRIVER’s Guide to European Repositories: Five Studies of Important Digital Repository Related Issues and Good Practices, ed. by Kasja Weenink, Leo Waaijers and Karen van Godtsenhoven (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), pp. 103–12.
