DRIVER II European repository project concludes successfully
The two-year EU project DRIVER II – Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research – came to a successful end in mid-February 2010. The Review Committee approved all of the project’s products.
The purpose of the DRIVER II project was to create a future-proof repository infrastructure enabling open access to research results. The project involved converting the pilot developed in the DRIVER I project into a production environment. Initially, a minimum of 15 countries were to participate in the environment. In the end, 33 countries joined the partnership.
One of the products of this collaborative European project is the D-NET 1.2 software package, used by the DRIVER search portal to provide access to more than 2,500,000 publications (articles, dissertations, books, lectures, reports and so on) in 249 repositories in 33 countries. The successor to this software, D-NET 2.0, will be suitable for enhanced publications. It currently exists in prototype but is not yet ready for production.
The Dutch contribution to the DRIVER II project, which was coordinated through the SURFshare programme, consists of the following.
1. The DRIVER Guidelines. These were drafted to answer questions and solve problems encountered by repository managers when setting up, installing and configuring their repository.
2. Six studies carried out by SURFshare in collaboration with various partners (Ghent University in particular) and reported on in three publications:
• The European Research Repository Landscape 2008: Inventory of Digital Repositories for Research Output by Maurits van der Graaf.
• Enhanced Publications: Linking Publications and Research Data in Digital Repositories by Saskia Woutersen-Windhouwer et al.
• Emerging Standards for Enhanced Publications and Repository Technology by Karen van Godtsenhoven et al.
3. A report, animation and demonstrator for the long-term preservation of enhanced publications, available at http://research.kb.nl/DRIVERII/EP-LTP_demonstrator.html
4. And finally, a demonstrator for enhanced publications, available at http://driver2.dans.knaw.nl/
The Review Committee concluded its final review by praising the partners’ extra efforts. Thanks are due to all those who worked to achieve this splendid result.
The project results are available at www.driver-repository.eu/
Cooperation on this project has now been extended to a global scale in the shape of the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR), http://coar-repositories.org/. SURFfoundation is a member of the confederation, whose purpose is to raise awareness of research results and their application by linking repositories worldwide into a single network.
More information and contact
More information about DRIVER I and II is available on the DRIVER website www.driver-community.eu. You can also contact Marjan Vernooy on +31 (0)30 234 6600.