23 February 2010

The National Research Environment

Portuguese research environment has been changing and growing significantly in the last decade; it was very small and underdeveloped until the 1990’s. The number of researchers and the scientific output referenced internationally has been growing in the last years at an annual average rate higher than 10%.  Just as an illustration, the number of Portuguese articles per year referenced on ISI databases was under 1.000 until 1990 and currently the number is higher than 8.300 (Source: GPEARI).

The national research environment in Portugal considering the size and significance of their research output, as well their legal status, can be broadly distinguished into Higher Education Institutions (HEI), i.e. Universities, Polytechnics, Higher Institutes, and Research Centres (RC). Other types of institutions also carry out scientific research in Portugal, but to a much smaller extent, such as public and private hospitals, institutes, private companies, etc. The HEIs carry out the most significant proportion of the scientific output produced in Portugal.

In Portugal the public and private HEIs are under the purview of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education (MCTES), which provides the main proportion of HEIs budgets. The Portuguese HEIs and the scientific community in general are very active at obtaining EU funds to support their research, as it’s recognized that the public funding attributed to the HEIs has been scarce in the last years, for that reason the EU Framework Programmes (FPs) has been an important revenue for scientific research funding.

Open Access and Repositories

The open access repositories activities in Portugal are currently undergoing a strong momentum as the reflex of the growing interest and involvement of the Portuguese academic and scientific community in the questions related with Open Access to scientific literature.

In Portugal, the development of Open Access has mostly been carried out by the universities, who have taken different initiatives to expand access to research information. The first Portuguese Open Access initiatives were initiated by the University of Minho with the creation of RepositóriUM - its institutional repository (October 2003) and the subsequent definition of a pioneering self-archiving policy (January 2005).

In early 2008, CRUP resent to the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education (MCTES) by resending the Conference of Rectors of the Portuguese Universities Declaration on Open Access and stated its support for the recommendations from the European University Association (EUA) Working Group on Open Access.

In the middle of 2008, the RCAAP (Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal = Portugal Open Access Science Repository) initiative was established. The RCAAP initiative aims to increase the visibility, accessibility and dissemination of Portuguese research outputs, as well integrating Portugal worldwide in this domain. The first phase of RCAAP started in July and ended in December (2008) and the project has been renewed annually in 2009 and 2010. The main components of the RCAAP project are the following:

• RCAAP Portal: collects, aggregates and indexes open access scientific contents from Portuguese institutional repositories, and forms a single entry point for searching, discovery and viewing thousands of scientific and scholarly publications;
• SARI (ASP service for institutional repositories): allows institutions to create and completely “brand” their repositories as desired in a central infrastructure;
• Repositories Validator: a tool that measures the degree to which a repository conforms with RCAAP requirements (based on the DRIVER guidelines).
• Communication, promotion and training activities

Furthermore within the RCAAP project an “Open Access Policy Kit” was created. It contains a set of useful information and resources for the formulation and implementation of Open Access policies for research institutions (especially universities) and funding policies. Commissioned by the RCAAP project, it has also produced the report: “Open Access in Portugal: A State of the Art Report”

Currently there are 26 open access repositories on a production stage indexed on the RCAAP Portal, but there are others currently on testing/installation stages. The IRs that are already in production stage, index more than 40.000 scientific documents.

In Portugal the publishing of scientific journals is mainly administered by the active scientific societies within each respective research field. In most cases, journal subscription is connected to a membership and is offered as a membership benefit, mostly in printed form. The number of Open Access journals in Portugal currently is low and there aren’t many examples of institutional memberships for OA publishing in journals. The only two examples registered in recent years were University of Minho and Faculty of Medical Sciences - New University of Lisbon which had a membership with BioMed Central but it is currently discontinued.

Recently the Fundação para Computação Científica Nacional (FCCN) joined the consortium SCOAP3 (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics) representing Portugal.

In 2005 a Portuguese section of the SciELO project (on Open Access publication) was announced and released. The Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) is an electronic virtual library covering selected scientific journals collections from Latin America, Spain and Portugal. Currently the Portuguese section of the SciELO project, SciELO Portugal, hosts 26 open access journals published by Portuguese entities and the Directory of Open Access Journal (DOAJ) references 33 scientific open access journals published in Portugal.

The Portuguese government, and public and private funders have not yet announced any official OA policies or mandates, but the Conference of Rectors of the Portuguese Universities (CRUP) has recommended to the Portuguese research funding organizations that they implement a policy of mandatory depositing of the research output. Furthermore, CRUP generally supports the EUA Working Group recommendations, and sees their approval by the European Research Council (ERC) as an important step towards a generalized mandate on Open Access by the European Union.

Finally, the RCAAP project intends to provide information about Portuguese news & OA events on a regular basis, in addition to the the RCAAP project support website information will also be disseminated on RCAAP’s Blog, Twitter and Facebook.

Contributors Contact Details

Eloy Rodrigues (University of Minho), e-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Ricardo Saraiva (University of Minho), e-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

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