FECYT - Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology
Mission
FECYT aims to strengthen the link between science and society through actions that promote open and inclusive science, scientific culture and education, responding to the needs and challenges of the Spanish Science, Technology and Innovation System.
Contribution to Open Science
The Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT, from its Spanish initials) is a public foundation under the Ministry of Science and Innovation. FECYT was established in 2001 with the aim of promoting scientific research of excellence as well as the development and technological innovation necessary to increase the competitiveness of Spanish industry and improve the quality of life of citizens, encouraging collaboration between agents involved in the R&D landscape, and the dissemination and communication of research and innovation results.
Goals and objectives
FECYT aims to achieve two major key results: (1) Increase the public value of science and innovation, through dissemination, communication and participation in science actions. (2) Promote Open Science, in line with the guidelines of the Ministry of Science and Innovation and supporting the Ministry. To achieve these objectives, the work of de FECYT focuses on: (a) Promoting participation in science and placing it at the center of public debate; (b) Increasing education and culture in science and innovation (c) Promoting global science; (d) Consolidating access to scientific knowledge.
Contact Info
Pilar Rico Castro | Laura Bonora Eve
Services
- Since 2007, FECYT runs the ARCE project for setting best practices and quality standards in academic edition, for evaluating National academic journals and for providing them with an open access edition platform based on Open Journal System (OJS). FECYT runs a call for editing and scientific standards evaluation launched every other year for those Spanish journals looking for a quality hallmark that certifies their work. Currently, 6 calls have been launched and 396 academic journals (out of 1900) have been certified as “excellent” in their editorial practices, their external visibility and their scientific impact. These certified journals operate in the open software OJS based platform RECYT (Spanish Repository for Science and Technology), provided and maintained by FECYT. Since 2019, FECYT provides to the National R&D Evaluation Agency and to the academic community with a journals ranking based on their quality evaluation of the national academic journals. This ranking is used by National key actors for scientific evaluation purposes.
- FECYT works for coordinating the implementation of the Open Access National policy in Spain under the Ministry for Science and Innovation and in close collaboration with the National Open Access Point of Reference designated by the European Commission. Since 2009, FECYT manages RECOLECTA, the National Harvester for Open Access Repositories, in collaboration with the National Network of University Libraries (REBIUN). FECYT promotes that every University and R&D centre creates and manages its own institutional repository (currently there are 74 institutional repositories in Spain). In addition, RECOLECTA provides to the National community with added value services, such as: the development and implementation of a statistics service; dissemination of reports and news on Open Access, and the representation of the Spanish repositories’ community in both national and international arena.
- FECYT funds and coordinates the “Infrastructures and Standards for Open Science” (INEOS) pilot project. Its goals are to modify the publishing policies of national scientific journals through the inclusion of open access requirements and underlying data publication practices, and the implementation of data publishing protocols, as well as to enlarge metadata enrichment services through the inclusion of permanet identifiers requirements (like ORCiD, DOIs, FundRef, etc. ) for both Scientific Journals and in OA Repositories.
- Besides, FECYT holds a leading role as the coordinator of the National Open Science Committee, where the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, the National R&D Funding Agency, the National R&D Evaluation Agency, the representative for Spain at the EOSC Governing Board, and other key decision makers from the National Government are working in the definition of the National Open Science policy.
- At the international level, FECYT belongs to the OpenAIRE consortium as well as to the OpenAIRE Legal Entity. FECYT has been involved in all the editions of the OpenAIRE project since its primary edition: OpenAIRE – Open Access Infrastructure Research for Europe (2009-2012), OpenAIREplus – 2nd Open Access Infrastructure Research for Europe (2011-2014), OpenAIRE2020 – 3rd Open Access Infrastructure Research for Europe (2015-2018), and OpenAIRE Advance - OpenAIRE Advancing Open Scholarship (2018-2020). FECYT participates in Outreach and dissemination work package, and in Support and Training work package, holding the role of National Open Access Desk (NOAD).
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