National Open Access Desk

 

The open access repositories activities in Portugal are 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. 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.The main components of the RCAAP project are the following:

• RCAAP
• Project website 
• Validator

Currently, there are in Portugal 51 scientific open access repositories in a production stage and aggregated in the national portal - RCAAP Portal. Altogether, the running IR’s, gather more than 600 000 scientific documents in open access. The repositories which seem to have higher degrees of success are those with self-archiving policies implemented.

 

RCAAP offers SaS hosting services for repositories (based on DSpace) and OA journals (based on OJS). Currently RCAAP hosts 27 repositories and 22 journals.

In the 2010, within the RCAAP project activities it was produced a report on the subject of research data: "Open data Repositories: State of the Art". This study marked the beginning of the RCAAP intervention on the domain of data curation generated by research activities, its organization in scientific data repositories and their access. Besides collecting updated information on the subject and the most relevant initiatives related to the management and access to scientific data through repositories, the objective of this document was also to inform and guide the development of a pilot project repository of scientific data.

 

Currently, there are 51 scientific open access repositories in a production stage and aggregated in the national portal - RCAAP Portal. At local level, there are also known some initiatives and pilot projects regarding research data in early stages of development. See also: RCAAP (pilot) R3DATA.

 

There are some domain specific data repositories like  BioData.pt, a portuguese e-infrastructure for biological data and the Portuguese ELIXIR node, that supports the national scientific system through best practices in data management and state of the art data analysis. It interfaces with both academia and industry, making research available for innovation, namely in sectors such as agro-food and forestry, sea, and health.

 

Other good example is PORTULAN CLARIN another infrastructure for Science and Technology of Language, which is include in the National Infrastructure Strategic Roadmap and part of the International Infrastructure CLARIN ERIC.

 

At the institutional level the implementation of these data management supporting infrastructures is still not very expressive, as we have been able to find out from the source of data repository registries in r3data. We point out the data repository of the University of Minho (DataRepositoriUM), recently presented early this year (February 2020), based on the dataverse software. 

 

Even so, there are some examples related to research data support, as for the development and training on how to better create a data management plan and all the steps to be taken along the research project and, some tools developed at the academia level, in order to better suit researchers in some specific areas. One example is the Dendro platform.

 

Another example came from Faculty of Social and Human Sciences - University of Lisbon where studies are in course,  either related to the study of supporting infrastructures on RDM for social sciences (DESIR project associated to the European infrastructure DARIAH ). The University of Aveiro is putting in place a strategy  to empower their staff, on a 1st level, with the necessary skills in order to provide a robust and knowledgeable answer to their research community experiences doubts and questions.

 

At a national level there’s a plan of action that is going to be discussed during the present year (2020),  in the 6th Research Data Management Fórum,  dedicated to the infrastructures of the national roadmap, aiming the national science and technology infrastructures, in order to strengthen national alignment with international initiatives in this area.

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 Fundação para a Computação Científica Nacional (FCCN) has 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. In 2011, the RCAAP initiative, designated: Scientific Journal called Hosting Service (SARC), was devised to foster the development and facilitate the management of Portuguese journals in open access and assist them in the transition to the open access publication paradigm, making the editorial cycle more efficient and advertising content by providing tools for sustaining these journals, based on the best practices and by using the Open Journal System (OJS) platform. Nationally, in the field of open access journals there have been other interesting initiatives in some institutions to promote quality improvement, like project Blimunda which promoted a better knowledge of the Portuguese spectrum regarding self-archiving policies of publishers and national scientific journals.

 

There is also the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), 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 68 open access journals published by Portuguese entities and the Directory of Open Access Journal (DOAJ) references more than 60 scientific open access journals published in Portugal.

 

Pursuing the coherence and internal robustness for Portuguese publishing a new project is being developed, PubIn Project. The project is developed by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia/Fundação para a Computação Científica Nacional (FCT/FCCN) and by Universidade do Minho (UM), in order to address the current situation of scientific publication, which is characterised by verticalized management at the editorial level when it comes to providing services (scientific journals); insufficient interoperability among themselves and obsolescence of platforms in use, along with a lack of publishing management skills.

 

The SCIELO Portugal will also benefit from this project has it will be reconfigured so that it can adopt the recommendations issued by SCIELO regarding the use of the JATS-XML format. It will imply the customization of the new systems, necessary to make the information available in this format. 

 

RCAAP still makes available the service SARC: Scientific Journal called Hosting Service in order to develop and facilitate the open access Portuguese journals management and assist them in the transition to the new paradigm of Open Science publishing, towards a more efficient and well communicated editorial cycle, by providing tools for sustaining these journals, based on best practices and by using Open Journal System (OJS). Currently SARC hosts 22 journals from several institutions and more than 9800 publications.

The main initiatives developed are organised by RCAAP and UMINHO. Hence, the Academic Libraries Working Group from the Portuguese Association of Librarian, Archivists and Documentalists, and more recently the Portuguese RDM Forum offer other opportunities to discuss, improve and explore Open Science and RDM related subjects. MCTES is also providing some new training materials aligned with the development of the National Open Science Policy.