The University of Luxembourg has agreed to actively participate in the Open Access initiative. Defined in the Budapest (2002), Bethesda (2003) and Berlin (2003) declarations on Open Access, it is an effort to make scholarly publications freely available to the public - because the content creator pays for publication, rather than a corporation underwriting the cost and retaining copyright while charging a subscription fee for access.
Through the signature of a collaboration agreement with the University of Liège (ULg), the University of Luxembourg hopes to inspire its researchers to use a pay-to-publish journal in order to attain the success that the ULg has achieved with ORBi , its digital repository: in just under 6 years, researchers at ULg have entered over 78,700 references, 60% with full-text. As stated in 2011 by Bernard Rentier, Rector of ULg: “ Today ORBi is the most active institutional repository of its type in the world.”
In March 2012 alone, ORBi registered more than 104,000 consultations and more than 48,000 publication downloads.
This collaboration agreement will, through the transfer of knowledge and experience, strengthen the ties between the Universities, both partners in the University of the Greater Region project. It will, above all, provide the University of Luxembourg with its own digital repository, ORBi lu .
Primary research via search engines
The benefits of open access and repository tools are numerous. Besides the preservation aspects, it will increase access to what UL researchers are doing by making their scientific work more visible and more widely read and used. By putting in place its own repository, ORBi lu , the University of Luxembourg hopes to significantly increase the worldwide impact of its scientific production and, in particular, to increase the number of citations of articles published by its researchers.
This increased visibility will open up, as well, new partnering opportunities. Once ORBi lu is in place - planned for the first quarter 2013 - the results of research performed at the University of Luxembourg will be available via a simple online search.
