The DRIVER project: on the road to a European Commons for scientific communication

The European DRIVER project (the Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research) builds a repository infrastructure combined with a search portal for all the openly available (Open Access) European scientific communication. The goal is to aggregate all the Open Access 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.driver-repository.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 Open Access movement with the readers and authors. Specific studies (Mossink, W., 2007. Intellectual Property Rights, in: Weenink, K. et al., (Eds.), A DRIVER’s guide to European repositories: Five Studies of Important Digital repository related Issues and Good Practices. Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, pp.103-112) about copyright for digital repositories have been issued, and the DRIVER project partners keep advocating an Open Access mandate for all the publications funded by the EC, in parallel with geographically-based or subject-based mandates. The last couple of years have seen a rise in ‘self-archiving’ mandates issued by major research funders and institutions, both in Europe as well as in the USA, which is a favorable evolution for authors’ rights as well as for the greater public. Since authors are ‘obliged’ to retain some rights to their work, this allows them to put articles online, which enhances their readership and impact (Piwowar, H. A., et al., 2007. Sharing Detailed Research Data Is Associated with Increased Citation Rate. PLoS ONE, vol. 2 (3): e308 ). This, in turn, accelerates science because of the timely and free availability of the publications. The more articles, proceedings, raw data and research results become available, the more DRIVER can build on these data with services for both readers and authors, who will be encouraged by the positive effects (enhanced readership and impact) and deposit more articles. The ‘V’ in the DRIVER acronym embodies this strategic Vision: a Scientific Commons for Europe and the rest of the world.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.