5 minutes reading time (925 words)

Celebrating RECOLECTA's 15th anniversary

scholarly communication country highlights infrastructure

15 Jun 2022

A post event summary

The Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) has celebrated in Madrid the 15th anniversary of RECOLECTA with a national event for the repositories' community. RECOLECTA is the national harvester of Open Access repositories that aggregates 167 repositories and includes more than 2,5M documents and 28.000 datasets.

RECOLECTA provides the Spanish community of repositories with metadata certification services based on OpenAIRE's guidelines, metadata enrichment services for the funding reference, aggregation and visibility services.

The objectives of the event were:

• Present the strategic alliances of RECOLECTA with COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories), LA Referencia (Federated Institutional Repositories of Scientific Publications Network) and OpenAIRE, and explain what those alliances mean for the national community.

• Analyze both the national and the international Open Science contexts in which FECYT's services to the national repositories are developed.

• Explain the new developments and services for the national community in which the RECOLECTA team has been working for the last two years.

The event was opened by the General Director of FECYT, Imma Aguilar, who stated that "our National Science and Technology System needs strong digital platforms for publication, storage and long-term preservation of scientific information".

Cristina González, Director of the Department of Scientific Information Management highlighted the importance of the services that FECYT provides to the national R&D&I system and recognized the effort made by all institutions to create and strengthen their institutional repositories. Pilar Rico, Head of the Open Access, Repositories and Journals Unit, highlighted that the National and the European open-access policies are based on repositories and explained the efforts made by FECYT to also place them at the center of the Open Science national strategy.

Kathleen Shearer, executive director of COAR, explained the role of the Confederation as a worldwide advocate of the role of repositories in the environment of communication and long-term preservation of research results. Also, she got into details of specific COAR actions such as the Notify project and the working group of aggregators chaired by COAR and FECYT.

Bianca Amaro and Lautaro Matas, President and Executive director of LA REFERENCIA respectively, celebrated that RECOLECTA's joined them as a full member in 2020 and defended the importance of extending Open Science practices in Latin America. They also presented LA Referencia work methodology based on national nodes, the coordination of policies and on cooperative technological developments.

Eloy Rodrigues, from the OpenAIRE governing board, analyzed all the different services that OpenAIRE provides to the research community, to the repositories and to public decision-makers in the process of implementing the Open Access mandates of the European Commission, and invited all Spanish repositories to join the legal entity.

The afternoon sessions addressed more technical content. José Manuel Barrueco, representing the University of Valencia and REBIUN, explained the background, the elaboration process, and the major milestones in the writing process of the "Guidelines for Evaluation of Open Access Repositories", coordinated by him together with FECYT.

Paco Martínez, from the Universitat Politècnica de València and a member of the RECOLECTA advisory board, analyzed the relationship between repositories and content aggregators, emphasizing the importance of the services provided by RECOLECTA as elements of added value compared to other collectors.

Laura Bonora, the technician behind RECOLECTA explained all new services of the aggregator in the last three years: its upgrade to the newest DNet version, the development of the new repository evaluation guide, its entry into LA Referencia, the creation of the RECOLECTA advisory board, the launch of the metadata enrichment service, the aggregation and visualization services of research data sets, the aggregation of ORCiD metadata, and the aggregation of RECOLECTA metadata made by LA Referencia and OpenAIRE.

Ana Poveda, from the Carlos III University of Madrid and representative of the REBUIN repository working group, addressed the needs of repositories regarding usage statistics and the progress made by her group with OpenAIRE.

Joaquín Tribaldos, project manager of the FECYT Analysis and Development Unit, discussed in detail the solution that RECOLECTA is developing to provide reliable and robust usage statistics to the repository community.

Finally, FECYT concluded that the new challenges of RECOLECTA for the coming years include developing a new repository statistics system, designing a new duplication system as well as a quality seal for the evaluation of Open Access repositories.

More than 60 people attended the in-person event and more than 300 followed it through the live broadcasting on the FECYT YouTube channel. The video is available for viewing here.

About FECYT

The Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology, F.S.P. is a public foundation attached to the Ministry of Science and Innovation. Thanks to this collaboration, the FECYT works to strengthen the link between science and society through actions that promote open and inclusive science, culture and scientific education, responding to the needs and challenges of the Spanish system of science, technology and innovation.

FECYT as Spanish NOAD

FECYT has been part of all the OpenAIRE consortia since its first edition as the Spanish NOAD. The synergies between OpenAIRE and RECOLECTA are very strong in all aspects related to the standardization of identifiers and the interoperability of open access repositories.