Leo Waaijers: DARE to Inspire

I was privileged to be asked to present a homage to Leo Waaijers yesterday at the SURF foundation in Utrecht (actually in an old castle+microbrewery – Stadskasteel Oudaen). Leo has been an architect of so much in the Netherlands that I cannot list all of it – perhaps the best is simply to reference one of his latest articles in Ariadne where he reviews eScholarship – practice and technology – and the principles of Openness.
The theme of the afternoon was “Inspire”. t was a great occasion where after the presentations we had a theatrical homage to Leo – hooded monks representing the four elements, and an excellent set of computer graphics and personal tributes from round the world – including many from UK/JISC.
I took the opportunity to honour Leo’s work in creating the DARE repository :

Promise of Science makes over 15,000 e-theses searchable.
DAREnet is the result of the DARE programme, funded by SURF. All Dutch universities, the National Library of the Netherlands, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) participate. From 1 January 2007 KNAW Research Information has taken over responsibility for the DAREnet website.

I was able to find over 2000 publications when searching for “chemistry”. I haven’t checked but I think most are theses. This is a fantastic resource. I could download one and within a minute[*] OSCAR had read much of the chemical data from it. It changes the way we should capture and publish data. The Netherlands can justly feel proud in leading the world with the coherence and commitment of their program on capturing eScholarship.

PS [*] Yes, I have to admit that I had to convert the PDF to something useful (ASCII) and then the parsing takes a few seconds. So, a simple message.
Besides archiving your PDF, archive the WORD or LaTeX file. That’s the message. It’s simple, so I’ll repeat it:
Besides archiving your PDF, archive the WORD or LaTeX file.