Procurement & contracting
Content Procurement
Beneficial for the knowledge sector
By combining the demand from institutions and acting collectively, we secure favourable contractual terms and competitive prices. We facilitate joint decision-making within the consortia and represent the interests of the Dutch knowledge sector. In doing so, we take the sector’s public values as our guiding principle.
We take care of the entire process surrounding content contracts: institutions can participate easily, whilst we handle the administrative processing and contract management. Furthermore, we monitor implementation and intervene when agreements are not being honoured.
SURF’s services
Our services relating to the procurement of content access consist of:
We support the preparation of (re)negotiations by analysing transaction data, identifying risks and advising negotiation teams. We manage agreements with publishers, ensure legal commitments are met and handle the administration relating to participation, cost allocation and invoicing. We also carry out feasibility studies for new agreements.
We manage and monitor the quality of journal data covered by the SURF agreements. This data forms the basis for services such as the Journal Browser, which allows researchers to see in which journals they can publish in Open Access without incurring additional APC costs.
In ConsortiaManager, we manage all relevant data on publishers, products and participating institutions. Institutions can purchase products via this system, after which processing for publishers and invoicing are handled. In addition, we ensure compliance, audit and information security.
We advise institutions, consortia and networks on Open Access at strategic, tactical and operational levels. We apply our expertise to contracts, policy development and national and international collaborations, through advice, presentations, workshops, working groups and knowledge-sharing. We lead national projects in the field of Open Access and the underlying systems and processes. In doing so, we connect institutions, suppliers and national and international partners. We support the progress of Open Access agreements, provide information on relevant developments and offer assistance with queries or escalations to publishers.
We also facilitate contract negotiations with publishers, offer strategic advice, prepare the ground for decision-making and actively maintain a national and international network.
The Scholarly Article Metadata Hub contains reliable metadata on Dutch academic publications and constitutes a unique national resource. The infrastructure supports the storage, management and provision of publication data and includes, amongst other things, system administration, further development, quality assurance and user support.
Thanks to the high quality and reliability of the data, the Scholarly Article Metadata Hub can be used for analyses, policy information and formal reports. The facility also offers opportunities for further scaling up within the Dutch research sector.
The metadata is used to provide advice and support in negotiations, contract management and strategy development. In addition, institutions themselves have access to the metadata hub to carry out their own analyses using both dashboards and datasets.
Every year, we produce the official Open Access Monitor on behalf of UNL. Institutions provide their publication data for this purpose, which we then process and enrich. The results, together with an analysis and the underlying data, are supplied to UNL, which in turn uses them for its annual report to the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. The data and scripts used are also made openly available to third parties to ensure transparency and facilitate reuse.
We answer questions about contracts and services, provide opportunities for knowledge exchange, and support institutions and partnerships in implementing the agreements.