ORBi: 100,000 publications in Open Access!

On July 12, 2024, ORBi, the University of Liège's institutional scientific repository, passed the symbolic milestone of 100,000 publications available in Open Access, making them accessible worldwide at the click of a button! This success testifies to ULiège's commitment to the free dissemination of scientific knowledge.

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his symbolic milestone has just been reached thanks to a proactive policy and the involvement of researchers at ULiège - which has been and remains a forerunner in Open Access - and which actively contributes to a more open science. Open Access increases the visibility of the work of ULiège scientists, which undeniably encourages international collaboration and accelerates scientific advances.

Depositing articles: a legal obligation since the FWB's Open Access decree

Since May 3, 2018, this matter has been the subject of a decree issued by the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles (FWB). This decree defines obligations for researchers, institutions or even the people/commissions responsible for evaluating publications in the event of appointment, promotion, etc.

What are the decree's obligations?

• Researchers must submit to ORBi articles resulting from research funded in whole or in part by the FWB and published in periodicals published at least once a year.
• Submission must take place immediately after acceptance by a publisher.
• Access to articles in archived scientific periodicals must be immediately free at the researcher's initiative.
• If a publisher imposes an embargo, this deferred access must not exceed 6 months for science, technology, human or veterinary medicine, and 12 months for the humanities and social sciences.
• During the embargo period, researchers may provide copies on request.
• The evaluation of individual or collective dossiers is based on lists of articles generated from the institutional digital archives and whose full text is available in open access in the archives according to the model appropriate for the specific context and to the exclusion of any other list.

Last month more than 500 scientists deposited 1042 publications. Of these, 76% contain full text and 76% are open access. The University of Liège's institutional repository now contains over 238,000 scientific references.

Since its launch in 2007, over 40 million downloads have been made from the ORBi platform, managed by ULiège Library.

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Paul Thirion