National OA mandate and its potential conflicting relationship with international scientific cooperation policies: the Dutch case

Abstract

Open access mandates are setting standards on how to publish open access, as well as indicate the timeframe in which these goals are supposed to be reached. Parallel to the OA development, taken up both nationally as well supra-nationally, European and thus also Dutch academics are confronted with an increasing pressure to cooperate scientifically with European partners, via the consortia obligations expressed via for example EU funding instruments such as those under the more recent Framework programmes. So we notice for many years an increasing tendency to internationally collaborate for European science. The results presented in this study are part of a larger analysis in which CWTS supports the University and Royal Library system (UKB) in the Netherlands in their negotiations with the publishing industry, oriented towards the so called Big Deals. In this study, the question arose to what extent Dutch output was directly under the Big deals, that mean, a situation in which any publication with a Netherlands based author as corresponding author was involved, would get OA format published. The main research question here is: to what extent is the Dutch OA mandate hindered by EU policies to increasingly work together internationally for EU scientists (for example via EU Framework programmes, such as Horizon2020) ?