December 2006

Acquerir les documents numeriques: les archives ouvertes.
Jean Sykes, Nereus Programme Director, talks of Nereus and Open Access at the Entretiens a la BnF, France on 7 December 2006. For the presentation, click here.

November 2006

Monash University to join Nereus.

Monash University is a leading university in the area of economics in Australia. It also leads the renowned national ARROW Project (Australian research repositories online to the world). Nereus looks forward to sharing expertise with its most recent partner in the area of IRs and open access.
Nereus will continue to focus on profiling excellent research in Europe, but will also expand to include US institutions and others abroad.
Monash University will serve as a linking-pin from Europe to Australia. In due course Nereus wishes to find other linking-pins, hopefully starting with the US.

October 2006

Economists Online poster session at Open Scholarship 2006 Conference.

Economists Online presented its organisation and services behind its subject-specific service to an international audience at Glasgow University at Open Scholarship 2006: New Challenges for Open Access Repositories. on Friday, 20th October 2006

September 2006

Economists Online in Germany

Olaf Siegert and Ralf Flohr from ZBW will present Economists Online at two German Conferences in September.
The national Meeting of library subject specialists in economics from 19-20 September 2006 will be held in Cologne this year. "Economists online - ein internationales Open-Access-Projekt für die Wirtschaftswissenschaften" is the opening presentation of the two-day event.

In addition, Economists Online will be held in a session on portals on 28 September at the “IuK-Tagung” (Conference of Researchers Associations) in Goettingen.

August 2006

Universite Paris Dauphine will join Nereus in October 2006

Dauphine will be Nereus's third French partner, further profiling excellent French economics research. Universite Paris Dauphine is one of the leading academic institutions for economics in Europe. Isabelle Sabatier, the Dauphine library director, looks forward to collaborating with Nereus from October 2006 onwards.

Nereus at 2006 Annual European Economics Association event

The 21st Annual Congress of the European Economics Association took place in Vienna this year. Economists Online was present at a stand to talk to researchers about information retrieval and dissemination.
For more information on the congress, see here

July 2006

Versions survey closes: just under 600 responses from 46 countries.

The online Versions questionaire recently surveyed researchers and information professionals on version management. 464 researchers and 133 other professionals (including library staff, university senior management, research funders, publishers, the software community) responded.
The Versions team is in the process of analysing the results and expect to report back in the autumn. When complete, the analysis of results will appear on the VERSIONS website at http://www.lse.ac.uk/versions.

One-day workshop on implementing IRs to be organized by Université Libre de Bruxelles at Maastricht University on 4 October 2006

The morning will concentrate on technical requirements for the Nereus Economists Online service. The afternoon will be dedicated to several other implementation issues with respect to institutional repositories in general: with presentations on metadata issues, submission workflow, submission interfaces, integration into the research environment, etc.

We look forward to an interesting workshop serving Nereus members in their challenges with setting up IRs, giving technical guidelines, hints and tips, and where we will brainstorm on key aspects of an IR implementation.

June 2006

Nereus EO extended planning meeting

Nereus held its EO extended planning meeting to plan the extension of the current pilot to 15 leading universities at the University of Tilburg on 9 June 2006. The meeting looked at targets, priorities, challenges and risks, as well as consequences on planning and actions.

May 2006

Nereus at INFORUM 2006 in Prague

Jacques Hellemans of ULB presented the paper: Open Access – a New Way for the Distribution of Scientific Information? at the INFORUM international conference on with professional electronic information resources for research, development, education and business purposes held from May 23 to May 25, 2006 in Prague.
The presentation was held on 24 May 2006.
For more information, go to The INFORUM Programme.

Versions: Survey into the issues surrounding version storage, management, and dissemination - your concerns as an author

- Have you ever found several versions of the samearticle on the Internet and needed to spend valuable time just deciding which is the best or latest one?
- When you write and revise your own papers, do you keep copies of everything ‘just in case’, or do you ruthlessly tidy your files and delete drafts when finished with them?
- When disseminating your own research papers to your peers, do you sometimes have to stop and think about which version to release?

If you ever have to consider these issues we would be very interested in your views. We would be grateful if you could spare 10 minutes to complete the online survey at http://www.survey.lse.ac.uk/versionssurveyresearchers. On completion of the questions, youwill be invited to enter aprize draw towin a 30GB iPod.
If you are a library/information professional please go to this survey: http://www.survey.lse.ac.uk/versionssurveyexperts

This survey into attitudes and experience relating to versions of academic papers is being conducted by the VERSIONS Project, led by the London School of Economics and Political Science, with associate partners the Nereus Consortium of European research libraries in economics. VERSIONS is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) under the Digital RepositoriesProgramme.

Nereus speaks at "Visible research. Can OAI help?" in Brussels on 15th of May
The Belgian Flemish Ministry for Science and Innovation organised, in collaboration with VOWB and VVBAD, and in the presence of the Flemish Vice-Minister-President and Flemish Minister of Economy, Enterprise, Science, Innovation and Foreign Trade, a one day workshop on the Open Archives Initiative. The main objective of the workshop was to persuade researchers why and how they can contribute to the open accessavailability of their research output.

The workshop started off with a general introduction on Open Access, and more specifically looking at the problem of copyright. The afternoon session was devoted to a series of short highlights on projects that explain how they contribute to the open access idea through the implementation of submission and workflow procedures in institutional repositories. Benoît Pauwels was invited to present Economists Online, which was received well.

April 2006

Nereus speaks at annual HUMANE conference in Copenhagen.
Paul Ayris presented "Success and failure in Scholarly Communications: wheredo we go from here?"to the The Heads of University Management & Administration Network in Europe Seminar.
The presentation addressed the Nereusconsortium of libraries with its vision and deliverables. It also gave insights into two Nereus projects: Economists Online (a new service) and Versions (a user study into version management funded by JISC and Nereus); and stressed the importance of the researcher. This was rounded off by touching on scholarly communication issues and Nereus within that.

Nereus presents at Berlin 4 Open Access Conference from Promise to Practice.
Economists Online was presented as a an example of amodel in the area of institutional repositories, their population and service development.
The audience of the session raised a number of questions. For example:

-What are the reasons behind some material not being available in full text? Is this related to publisher policies, author apprehension, or due to the older nature of publication?
This mainly has to do with publisher policies who restrict access to certain versions requested by some authors. However, in addition, some partners are retrodigitising more than others resulting in even further online full text.

- Will Economists Online visualise relations between versions of one and the same publication in the future?
Nereus is part of the JISC-funded Versions Project which is currently surveying authors and their version concerns. Once results have been analysed, Nereus will then seek to take steps to address these needs in its product design appropriately.

- The Economists Online project can be seen as an example of winning the hearts and minds of the researchers, are there plans to implement a mandate?
No, this is not planned; this method seems to bring furtherencouragement fromthe researchers regarding new ideas and the depositing of new material.

- Can materials of the project be made openly available?
The Nereus network will have to consider which material can be made shared with non-members, e.g. project documentation, reports and tools.

March 2006

Nereus invited to Berlin 4 Open Access Conference.
Economists Online will be presented as a success story at this international gathering of information professionals.
This conference,hosted by the Max-Planck-Institute, will address the following types of issues: open access for cultural heritage, open access to scientific (raw) data, the future of journal and non-journal publishing, authors' attitudes towards open access, new forms of scholarly communication.

February 2006

Nereus well received at innovative academic library conference

The Bielefeld conference hada number of prominent speakers from the library community who gave presentations over three days at one of the leadinglibrary community conferences on innovation and academic libraries.

Issues addressed were e-science, libraries and publishing models, measuring impact and user satisfaction, innovative services surrounding search systems and publishing, knowledge exchange between national ICT and information funding agencies, convergence, and others. Three other key issues were dealt with in a parallel session: Archiving and e-depositing, Marketing, and Institutional Repositories.

The Nereus Project Manager presented Nereus and Economists Online in the Institutional Repositories session. The Economists Online showcase and search service was launched here, as was the new website. As a result, new project ideas arose, as did interest in joining the network. For the presentation, go to: http://www.nereus4economics.info/bielefeld2006.ppt

A presentation by the European Commission also emphasised the importance of grid technology and current developments therein, as well as thenew fact that institutional repositories will now explicitly feature in the approaching FP7 Programme; which can mean further possibilities for funding for repository-based projects in the future.

The importance of strong relationships with our clients, i.e. researchers, was emphasised again and again throughout the conference, as was co-operation between libraries for cost-effectiveness and innovation. This shows that the Nereus model, and its project Economists Online, seems to be already on the way to fulfilling library aims for the future.

Nereus to present Economists Online at the 8th International Bielefeld Conference.
On 8 February, the Nereus Programme Manager will present a paper on the three crucial partnerships for a repository project. Libraries can achieve successful partnerships with authors and readers by offering a product of international scientific significance and by utilising international networks.
Economists Online will also officially be launched.
For more information on the 8th International Bielefeld Conference, click here.

Nereus launches new website
This new-look website should now inform both library and researcher more effectively of Nereus, its network and services.
Thanks gooutto the designer Avi Bercovich of in.4rm for his professionalism and creativity.

January 2006

Prague's Charles University and its Centre for Economic Research and Graduate Education (CERGE) joins Nereus.
CERGE is the first Central and Eastern European country to join Nereus in January 2006. CERGE is well known for its inernational economics and CEE research.