Europe's top economic research on display
Leading European economics libraries have won a EUR 2 million contract to create a networked service providing open access to economics information and showcasing Europe's leading research results. The libraries won the contract from the European Commission to work on the project, called Network of European Economists Online (NEEO), which will aim to address the lack of integration of academic output created by the way in which storage of and access to information is currently dispersed. The €2 million is connected with the eContentplus programme of the European Commission's Information Society and Media Directorate-General. 'We are very pleased with the support the European Commission is giving to this project. It confirms the interest of the EC in Institutional Repositories, open access and increasing the visibility of European research. It is encouraging that so many prominent institutions will collaborate in this area', said Hans Geleijnse, the Director of the project from Tilburg University. Based on the content of the institutional repositories of the partners, the Network will provide integrated academic output, including journal articles, working papers, chapters, conference proceedings and datasets. Through a central multilingual portal it will provide a full-text search service with links to the full-text research publications and primary data output. It will also include more comprehensive access to the life's work of 500 leading researchers. Content from the partner institutions will be complemented with content from other European and worldwide open access repositories so as to create a new portal of open access economics content. NEEO content will also appear in information retrieval services of significance to the economics author and reader. Tilburg University in the Netherlands is the leading partner in the project, which is due to start in September 2007. The project will run for 30 months.