chem-bla-ics

Yesterday, I received a letter from the Association of Universities The Netherlands (VSNU, @deVSNU) about Open Access. The Netherlands is for research a very interesting country: it's small, meaning we have few resources to establish and maintain high profile centers, we also believe strong education benefits from distribution, so we we have many good universities, rather than a few excelling universities. Mind you, this clouds that we absolutely do have excelling research institutes and research groups; they just are not concentrated in one university.

Another important aspect is that all those Dutch universities are expected to compete which each other for funding. As a result I have experience rather interesting collaborations between universities.