SURFshare Tender projects

Calls for tender are organised almost every year so that the vanguard of the Dutch higher education sector can test out innovations in scientific and scholarly communication. Half of the financing for the project proposals comes from SURF, with the rest being provided by the institutions concerned. The results of the tender projects are shared with all the institutions affiliated with SURF. There were calls for tender within the SURFshare programme in both 2007 and 2008 for the following three themes:

• Collaboratories: web-based collaboration environments to enable researchers to communicate with one another and to share information within the research process;
• Enhanced publications: publication of articles along with supplementary data, including the underlying research data, visualisations, public reviews, simulations, and multimedia files;
• Knowledge dissemination at Universities of Applied Sciences: improved knowledge sharing by universities of applied sciences aimed at encouraging the dissemination of knowledge to the public in general via repositories, i.e. digital storage areas for knowledge products that can be “harvested” there. Explicit attention is given to the role played in this process by the universities’ teaching staff and by “lectors” (who organise knowledge networks).

There are currently no plans for new calls for tender.