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DART-Europe: A European Research Portal for LIBER Libraries

Posted: 06-09-2019 Topics: Open Access

Participating in LIBER comes with many benefits. One of these is the opportunity to contribute to DART-Europe: an e-theses portal through which libraries can raise the visibility of their work and research by publishing Open Access metadata records and research theses.

In the following article, we explain in more detail what DART-Europe is and what LIBER libraries can gain from joining the DART-Europe partnership.

What is DART-Europe?

DART-Europe is the premier European portal for the discovery of research theses. As of January 2021, DART provides open access to 889,442 research theses from 535 Universities in 26 European countries.

Membership of DART-Europe is free to all participating libraries in Europe. It is of particular interest to research-intensive libraries and universities who are part of the LIBER network. The purpose of the DART portal is to provide a single point of access for researchers across the globe to the results of young, emerging, cross-cutting research.

Note that DART-Europe has, as of 2021, moved to a new platform and a new address: https://www.dart-europe.org.

How does DART-Europe work?

Metadata, not the full text, is harvested from member libraries’ repositories into the DART-Europe portal overnight for indexing. Browse indexes allow access by a number of routes – by university, by country or by year. Titles and abstracts are all indexed and keywords can be used to retrieve relevant documents. DART-Europe is administered by UCL (University College London) and governed by a Board consisting of representatives from partner organizations.

Benefits for LIBER libraries

By participating in the pan-European DART-Europe service, LIBER libraries contribute data and support Open Access services, in line with LIBER’s Open Access ambitions. Participation is free. Other benefits include:

Greater visibility for an institution and their research outputs via a portal which is a major discovery service for new European research;
Supporting early-career researchers by making their research outputs visible to a global community through one European portal,

Benefits for Authors & Readers

Authors and readers benefit in a number of ways by having their research visible through the portal:

Searching for related work performed anywhere in Europe is quick and easy;
Full-text of all theses indexed in DART-Europe can be downloaded;
Authors can receive greater visibility and citation through having their work accessible via DART-Europe.

Open Research & Open Science

The aims and ambitions of the DART-Europe portal are fully aligned with the Berlin Declaration on Open Access and the global Open Research/Open Science agenda. Open Access is good both for research and for the researcher. Research is enriched by a greater sharing of outputs and researchers can achieve greater recognition and visibility by making their research theses available in this way.

And Finally…

Libraries, their Universities and researchers can only gain by joining the DART-Europe partnership. If you are interested, please contact Paul Ayris, Pro-Vice-Provost at UCL Library Services.