The European DRIVER project aims to create a portal for freely accessible European research output. It is a service-oriented infrastructure that harvests data from qualitative institutional repositories and links the user to these data in an easy manner. Open access to the full text in these repositories or Open Archives, is of paramount importance.  

Twelve partners out of ten EU countries collaborate towards the first testbed of aggregated repositories. Within this project, the University Library of Ghent acts as a national partner for Belgium. More information on the other partners and the objectives of the DRIVER project can be found under Press Releases and at the European support website.

The task of the University Library of Ghent is to raise awareness about Open Access and scientific repositories, both with researchers as well as research administrations on the political level. For that purpose, DRIVER organises workshops and conferences.

On a more practical/technical level, DRIVER wants to speed up the development of institutional repositories in Belgium, by organising technical meetings and supporting the exchange of best practice between technical managers. That way, more repositories will be able to participate in the first testbed implementation. This group of experts already consists of twenty members of many different institutions.

DRIVER on Wikipedia.