Key networks & Aggregators
In Spain there is an important set of infrastructures that allow researchers to archive their work in open access: institutional repositories, thematic repositories, research open journals and research open journals portals. Among these, institutional repositories play a central role for the proper implementation of the National OA public policy.
RECOLECTA is an open platform based on DNet open source software that gathers all the national scientific repositories together in one place and guarantees that all OA repositories are interoperable among them. The services that RECOLECTA offers to National open access repositories are:
- Validator: The RECOLECTA validator allows every repository to self-scan, as often as they like, their compliance level with national and international interoperability guidelines relating to metadata formats, as well as with OAI-PMH protocol operation. It also facilitates a clear identification of records with errors. Those repositories that do not comply with RECOLECTA-OpenAIRE interoperability guidelines are taken out of RECOLECTA. Thus, a common quality standard is guaranteed for the National open access repositories community.
- Harvester: RECOLECTA harvests - on a weekly basis - metadata records of those scientific open access repositories that are compliant with the RECOLECTA-OpenAIRE interoperability guidelines and that request their inclusion in the RECOLECTA platform. For doing so, RECOLECTA uses the OAI-PMH address of their data provider.
- Search engine: RECOLECTA provides direct and free access to the entire Spanish scientific production deposited in open repositories through a single interface.
- Dissemination activities: News spread, organization of activities and helpdesk support through
RECOLECTA plays a key role to allow a proper implementation of the national open access to science policy. It promotes and coordinates the national infrastructure of Open Access digital scientific repositories in an interoperable manner based on the standards adopted by the global community.
The search interface of RECOLECTA provides access to more than 2M documents collected from the 142 data providers indexed in the platform.
national infra
Data repositories
Some Spanish universities and research institutions are taking steps forward related to research data both developing policies and infrastructure, but also designing new services to support researchers and fostering capacity building on librarians.
Particularly, Madroño is gathering their main services through their website InvestigaM, starting from the DMP tool Pagoda till their data repository e-Ciencia-datos. CSUC has also developed a tool to support the creation of DMPs Pla de Gestió de Dades de Recerca, besides a different set of guidelines to support researchers.
The Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) also provides data management services through Digital CSIC. At the moment there are 29 data repositories in Spain indexed at the re3data.org database, and some universities and research centres are working to establish the best tools to manage and open up research data such as the INIA.
Additionally, national and international research infrastructures based in Spain are collecting and archiving datasets; data processing centres, such as Barcelona Supercomputing Center, is already an international centre of reference providing services related to open science. In some cases, the centres are dealing successfully with the challenges of open science, such as the data protection issues at CRG-Center for Genomic Regulation, European Genome-Phenome Archive at the CRG.
national data repos
National publishing initiatives
Unlike other important publishing markets in the world, the majority of the Spanish research journals are published by not-for-profit organizations (75%): Public Research Centres, Universities, Professional Associations and Research and Scholarly Associations. This fact has been a favourable factor for the open access publishing model in Spain.
Taking a look into some numbers, the DOAJ indexes about 510 open access Spanish journals, therefore, about the 5.4% of the total journals in the database (2017). With regards to self-archiving policies, most of the Spanish journals contained in the Dulcinea database (76.31%) allow this kind of activity to authors.
At the moment FECYT is running projects aiming to enhance the quality of Spanish research journals and Spanish research collections, including criteria related to open access and publications ethics, distinguishing through a Seal of Quality those considered excellent. Currently, some of the Spanish agencies evaluating researchers’ activity are taking into account those Seals of Quality that include qualitative and quantitative indicators, that are not only based on impact indexes.
On the other hand, FECYT Unit of Scientific Resources is in charge of the negotiation of big deals with international publishers on behalf of the Ministry. As stated in the ERA Spanish Roadmap, one of its objectives is “to participate in the re-organisation and coordination of subscription and open access models with the key resource and scientific information suppliers – publishers – at national level, and to define a financially sustainable model in the mid-term in close relationship with the Conference of Rectors of the Spanish Universities.”
Despite being very recently tried, it was still not possible to raise a fruitful negotiation with publishers on open access due to the variety of factors and stakeholders involved.
National agreements with publishers
In December 2017, the Steering Committee set by FECYT to monitoring the level of compliance with the OA mandate at the state-level, published recommendations to universities, research centres and entities that subscribe access licenses to scientific journal for the full implementation of the national policy on open access:
Some of those recommendations for deals include reducing journal costs:
- The current resources set aside for subscription fees to journals and APCs should be enough to pay for scientific communication during the 21st century. Subscription renewals should not have annual increases higher than the national CPI. Increased contents or services should be covered with increased productivity deriving from ICT and not higher prices.
- More than 10-year-old contents in journals should be considered paid off and deducted from the price, in exchange for a reasonable fee to access the publishing platform.
- Licenses to access scientific contents should include open access publishing with no APCs for a certain number of articles.
- Research performing organisations should not pay twice for subscription and APCs (double dipping), regardless of what institution has paid for the APCs of the article. All subscription agreements should specify the price reduction for open access articles funded by APCs paid by any institution worldwide.
- When negotiating subscriptions, institutions should insist on the requirement to self-archive articles following the deadlines established in Article 37 of the Science Act.
The Steering Committee also recommends that public expenditure on subscriptions to journals, either global or per institution, should be published following the example of countries such as The Netherlands or Finland. All institutions should establish mechanisms to get to know and publish the costs for Article Processing Charges.
In Spain there are no National Licences on subscriptions to journals so far. Instead, there are 7 regional consortia that negotiate for their member institutions. In 2017, Spain tried to negotiate with Elsevier a National License for Science Direct, but it did not succeed.
The Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) has signed a pilot transformative agreement for 2019-2020 with the Royal Society of Chemistry, the first of its kind among research and academic institutions in Spain.
As committed in its ERA Roadmap, Spain will “participate in the re-organisation and coordination of subscription and open access models with the key resource and scientific information suppliers – publishers – at national level, and to define a financially sustainable model in the mid-term in close relationship with the Conference of Rectors of the Spanish Universities.” FECYT is working in negotiating transformative agreements with international publishers on behalf of the Ministry for Science and Innovation.
OA books
No information available.
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