December 2005

Nereus invited to present at the 8th International Bielefeld Conference.
Nereus invited to present at the 8th International Bielefeld Conference. How can libraries achieve successful partnerships for collaboration on repository work in the future through international collaboration? Nereus will share its experiences with the international library, information professional and publisher communities and audience in February 2006.

For more information, see the Programme.

November 2005

Nereus submits a bid to the EContentPlus 2005 Call for Proposals
Fifteen partners from eight European countries, largely already supported by their faculties, have submitted a proposal to create a subject-based repository showcasing excellent European economics research making as much of that work online and open access. It will build on the Economists Online pilot: will develop on lessons learnt, and will primarily focus on making European research more visible, accessible and usable and will provide more services of interest to the researcher.

With EU funding we hope to have the opportunity to build an infrastructure to allow the easy integration of more quality economics research from other additional institutions in the future, better showcasing European research; a model which could be adapted for other subject areas. The proposal also brings in new multilingual elements, and more added value services such as automised metadata enhancement, citation analysis, RSS feeds as well as a copyright toolkit for authors.

The first quarter of 2006 will inform us as to whether this endeavour for EU funding has been successful or not.

Nereus is expanding to Central and Eastern Europe: Prague in negotiations
Nereus envisages welcoming Charles University and its Centre for Economic Research and Graduate Education (CERGE) shortly to Nereus.

CERGE operates together with the Economics Institute (EI) of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. The joint workplace CERGE-EI has grown to be recognized as a regional center of educational excellence and has won numerous accolades from the European Commission, US governmental institutions, international grant authorities and research organizations. Its location also attracts researchers, faculty and students concerned with the impact of social, economic and political transition in the CEE region.

We hope to welcome them as our first Central and Eastern European partner in January 2006.

October 2005

Economists Online OAI4 breakout session at the Cern Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communications well-received
Some of the issues which came up in discussion were the tension between differing national copright law and policies and, given that, the different attitudes (interpretations, politics) of libraries within one country (conservative versus liberal); how you select and utilise champions to increase IR content; the importance of doctoral theses in IRs is evident and needs more strucutured organisation.

Author identification management needs to be tackled on an international level although other countries are beginning to organise this nationally in some cases (US and NL). National libraries are increasingly serving as national back-ups of academic output and repositories (Norway, Netherlands, Switzerland) - a worthy added value service for the researcher.

Regarding metadata and version management, to what degree do people indicate or worry whether an entry in a repository is peer-reviewed? There seems to be conflicting evidence on the topic. What do we do with pre- and post prints in IR's; is this dependent on the discipline? Is withdrawal an issue? Does the author decide? Does the IR decide? Do we archive or electronically publish or both? How do we keep track of versions of a publication? And complex objects?

In conlusion, disciplinary-oriented, aggregated repositories are becoming more and more important. A project of a similar set-up to Economists Online is "Dark" at Leiden University, though a national project with African studies as its topic. Corporate branding needs to be considered in order to distinguish the participants of aggregated services.

Carlos III, Madrid joins Nereus
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid join Nereus on 1 October 2005. This Univeristy is one of the leading economics universities in Europe, amongst the top 15. We welcome them to the network and look forward to their active participation.

Maastricht Univerity joins Nereus
Universiteit Maastricht are members of Nereus as of October 2005. This Univeristy is another prominent economics university in Europe and the Netherlands. Good experience has been gained with them so far in the Project Economists Online, and we look forward to more in the future.

Workshop held at LSE on The Data Library for Economics Researchers
A workshop for information specialists from various univerities around Europe was held at the London School of Economics and at its datalab to discuss some of the challenges in supporting one's researchers in this area. This begins a series of workshops as part of the Nereus Programme.

September 2005

Nereus to present and discuss Economists Online at the Cern Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communications
Nereus and Economists Online will hold a break-out session at the Cern Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communications (OAI4) at CERN, Geneva on 21 October 2005. We will primarily discuss the challenges and successes in involving researchers in an international initiative that serves both researcher, university and library.

For more information, see the conference website.

August 2005

Nereus attended two important international conferences for economics
Nereus was represented at the Econometric Society World Congress at UCL, London from 19-23 August 2005, and at the 20th Annual Congress of the European Economics Association at the University of Amsterdam with a presentation of Economists Online on Friday, 26 August 2005.

July 2005

Nereus Steering Committee meets at University College Dublin for its ninth session
Nereus was represented at the Econometric Society World Congress at UCL, London from 19-23 August 2005, and at the 20th Annual Congress of the European Economics Association at the University of Amsterdam with a presentation of Economists Online on Friday, 26 August 2005.

Nereus attended two important international conferences for economics
The Nereus Consortium met to discuss a number of issues including:

• The Nereus user survey, this confirmed that fast access to online journal articles, conference papers and book chapters are essential. Action will be based on some of these results.

• It also looked at the progress of the Economists Online service where more than 2,500 full text documents are now available via open access by some of the consortium's leading authors, with more on the way. After going back to its authors with the results, and its publication lists and search service, the service will be made publicly available from October 2005.

  For more information on Economists Online please go to its webpage.

• Regarding the Working Paper Service, Nereus will try to meet with RePEc at the EEA Conference in August in Amsterdam this year.

• Developing an MPEG21/DIDL xml schema and striving for getting an international OpenURL knowledgebase will also be important in months to come

• On 19 September 2005, about 25 persons will take part in a workshop on how to get better access to international data at the LSE data lab for all Nereus participating institutions

Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration joins Nereus
The Wirtschaftsuniversitaet Wien has just joined Nereus as our first Austrian partner of high standing. It will contribute with both high quality English and German content. We hope that WU-Wien will work together with Nereus to link in with CEE in the future.

June 2005

Nereus to discuss potential projects with the European Commission
Nereus will discuss various project ideas with the European Commission in June 2005 as a new call approaches, with an emphasis oninternational collection development, content enrichment and service development.

May 2005

Economists Online on its way to making 3000 documents available open access
Economists Online is in the process of finalising its pilot project whereby multilingual content from 4 countries will be placed in repositories and made openly accessible to the scientific community. The number of full text documents relating to near to 70 leading economists in Europe is approaching the 3000 documents mark, meaning increasing free access to important research.

Final results will be available in July 2005.

April 2005

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven joins Nereus
The K.U.Universiteit Leuven in the oldest existing catholic university in the world and largest university in the Low Countries. It also hosts leading scholars in the area of economics. Nereus looks forward to working with them in the future

March 2005

University College London will join Nereus in April 2005
University College London, with a renowned economics faculty and library, is a new member to Nereus as of 1 April 2005. The new President of the European Economics Association, Professor Richard Blundell, FBA, is also a faculty member of UCL. Nereus very much looks forward to working with UCL in the future.

February 2005

The University of Warwick will join Nereus in April 2005
Hywel Williams, Headof Academic Support and AnneBell,Head Librarian, have decided to join Nereus in 2005. Warwick's economics faculty has a high reputation in Europe and abroad.

Professor Ian Walker, of the Warwick Economics Department, is also a member of the Nereus Scientific Advisory Board, he is also the Secretary of the European Economics Assocation.

Sciences Po of Paris to join Nereus in April 2005
Michel Gardette as chief librarian of one of Europe's most distinguished universities Sciences Po Paris, France, is looking forward to working with the Nereus libraries from spring 2005.

University of Oxford to join Nereus in April 2005
Margaret Robb, Social Sciences Librarian is "looking forward to collaborating with its European colleagues on this very important venture". Oxford is one of the key leaders in economics research.

January 2005

Building a disciplinary-based repository for world economics
Nereus partners and the University of Maastricht are building a disciplinary-based repository for economics where parts of institutional archives are brought together to provide the researcher with new information products such as dynamic publication lists as well as a new innovative search service.

For more information, contact Thomas Place at Tilburg University.