As the unique five-year open science agreement between research institutions in the Netherlands and Elsevier approaches its third birthday, it’s clear that the initiative is a resounding success. The services that the collaborative agreement covers have seen better than expected uptake, and they continue to grow. Most members of the Dutch research community are now familiar with at least some aspects of the agreement, and are using it to their advantage. In 2022, together we realised 5,500 open access publications, 13 million unique article downloads, and a total of six active open science services, including the successful Data Monitor. Nearly all universities and medical centres are now taking part in at least one pilot, and most of them are participating in several.

To understand the origins of this open science agreement, we need to go back in time. Three years ago, Dutch academia had several ambitions that they urgently wanted to accomplish. One very important objective was to achieve 100% open access for all Dutch peer-reviewed publications. Other ambitions related to reproducibility and scrutiny; diversity, equity and inclusion within the research community; safeguarding academic and digital sovereignty; modernization of the system of recognition and rewards; open collaboration with societal actors; and innovative partnerships. Their ultimate goal was to ensure that everyone – including Dutch citizens, companies and the government – benefited from the highly-ranked research produced in the Netherlands. They also wanted to give researchers the space to focus their time and budget on their research.

This resulted in an appetite to invest in new kinds of initiatives that reached beyond the traditional ‘read and publish’ services to support the Dutch open science ambitions. So, in December 2019, Dutch research institutions and Elsevier signed a framework agreement for the world’s first national open science partnership. The agreement not only had to deliver, it also had to adhere to the guiding principles developed by Dutch universities. These were translated into joint collaboration principles and, like the agreement itself, they were shared with the global research community via a new, dedicated website. The principles address ownership of data, most importantly research data, and vendor lock-in, particularly – both concerns voiced by the research community. The ground-breaking agreement is comprised of three separate elements:

1. Open access publishing services: Under the terms of the agreement, Dutch researchers can publish open access in nearly all Elsevier’s 2,700+ journals.
2. Reading services: They can also access Elsevier’s full suite of journals via ScienceDirect.
3. Open science services: The agreement partners will work together to create innovative open science pilots that lead to more transparency and collaboration in research.

In early November 2022, an agreement steering group sat together to evaluate the services. They discovered that one of the most important achievements to date has been in the area of open access. Thanks to their co-ordinated efforts, Universities of the Netherlands (UNL) was recently able to announce that 82% of all Dutch publications in 2021 were open access, and this percentage is expected to rise. The Dutch research organizations and Elsevier have worked hard to contribute to this growth by making the publication process for Dutch authors as smooth and clear as possible. For Elsevier articles by Dutch authors this has resulted in 100% voluntary uptake of open access through a Creative Commons license, which provides a standardized way to grant the public permission to use creative work under copyright law.

At the same time, Dutch researchers continue to benefit from reading access to articles published by the rest of the world, which has resulted in a rise in usage and downloads of scholarly articles on ScienceDirect. .

The open science services are a particularly exciting and innovative part of the agreement. Initially launched as pilots, these services are agreed and co-created by all parties via an open process, with open documentation, that is shared via networks and a supporting website. All participating partners can suggest new open science pilots using this process.

The pilot services aim to help researchers share traditional (publications) and other forms of research outputs more widely, increasing their visibility to a global audience of colleagues and innovators. Another goal of the services is to enable researchers to focus their time and budget on their research efforts. As one of the participants in the project noted: “Let them focus on the science and we will make it open”.

Data Monitor is a great example of an open science service developed by the partnership. Increasingly, publishing experimental data and other forms of research data is considered a normal part of the research workflow. It can be very beneficial to researchers, allowing them to receive acknowledgement for their data sets. And growing numbers of universities, along with funders, such as the Dutch NWO, not only expect research data to be shared, they also want evidence of compliance. Typically, this has involved researchers being asked to upload the metadata to a dedicated platform, such as an institutional repository. Thanks to Data Monitor, that is no longer necessary. Data Monitor finds Dutch data sets in data repositories around the world, collects the associated metadata, and then sends it to the researchers’ universities. This ensures that the data become discoverable and can be shared via university websites and reused, but removes the need for researchers to upload the metadata themselves. Nearly all Dutch universities have joined this pilot and an early participant, University of Groningen, reports that Data Monitor has helped it increase the number of discoverable data sets in its research information management system, Pure, from 600 to 3,000. And thanks to Data Monitor’s automated transfer process, they have avoided up to 30 mins manual work per data set.

Additional pilots include:

• Grants Monitor: A service that will supply universities with the metadata linked to their received funding. It should eventually remove the need for researchers to do additional reporting to funders like NWO.
• Preprint Monitor: This service provides insights into current research by finding and sending preprint metadata to university systems and making them visible internally and externally.
• Website Support: The pilot with Amsterdam UMC is now complete and has resulted in a new and publicly-accessible website, which, for the first time, showcases detailed information on researchers from affiliated institutes, along with their research outputs and collaborations.

Elsevier’s technology is also driving two open science pilots that make sense of published literature in a smart way.

• Telescope finds research papers citing infrastructure (e.g. instrumentation, scientific equipment) to show how it has been used to create new knowledge and impact.
• Rare Disease Analytics shows where research is taking place on each of the 7,000 known rare diseases; information that can be used to support future Dutch research strategy.

So, looking at the numbers, it’s clear that the agreement is a success. All services are being used and overall interest and awareness is growing. Data and insights are being created that universities own and can share as they like. The intense level of collaboration between Elsevier and representatives of the Dutch research community has also improved mutual understanding. And it has started a lively discussion around exploring and implementing conditions for private and public collaboration.

Together, the partners are helping to position the Netherlands as a global frontrunner in open science. This may, in fact, be the most valuable outcome of this process: open discussions, learning and collaboration to jointly create a new future of open and transparent research, which is so badly needed to solve the global challenges we face today.

 

 

Blogpost by
Max Dumoulin,
Elsevier co-ordinator of the agreement
The author is grateful to the Steering Group members for their input