Services use cases
RCAAP
Enriching metadata records with funding information using the OpenAIRE API

The RCAAP portal (www.rcaap.pt) represents a single entry point for research, discovery, location and access to thousands of scientific and scholarly publications from scientific journals, conferences, theses and dissertations that are hosted in Portuguese repositories for the past ten years. The current list of aggregated resources is available here, and so far, RCAAP aggregates more than 600,000 records of national resources. The added value and innovation of this project was the development of a hosting service for institutional repositories and the creation of a "...meta-repository of national scientific and academic production, allowing research, access and use in the same environment in an easy and intuitive way...".
Needs and resources
RCAAP Portal, throughout the process of aggregation of records from various repositories, has been working on a continuous improvement of structured information, in order to ensure greater interoperability between the systems, aligned with the national and international scientific ecosystem requirements, meeting the open access, open data and open science guidelines. The quality of metadata is, so far, a condition in order to obtain information quality associated with publications, increasing their visibility, access and dissemination of Portuguese scientific research. It also provides a valuable information to the funding institutions, allowing to monitor their research outcomes.
To ensure the possibility to enrich the metadata records of aggregated repositories with the funding, project and grant information, the RCAAP Portal have integrated the OpenAIRE project API, allowing the bulk access to projects.
Procedures
Firstly, the repositories compatibility with "OpenAIRE guidelines" was fundamental, thus setting the basic prerequisite for communication. Starting from already existing metadata description standards, communication protocols (OAI-PMH) and controlled vocabularies in order to achieve the "machine-to-machine" communication process.
To establish this level of compatibility with repositories based on DSpace, an OpenAIRE Addon was created and installed in repositories aggregated by RCAAP (Service of Institutional Repositories Hosting - SARI). The conditions for the integration of OpenAIRE API in the RCAAP Portal were now fulfilled.
Impact
From this moment on, the RCAAP repositories network were able to benefit from all the enrichments that came from it: identification of the project funder, whether it came from FCT, Welcome Trust or the European Commission, link to publications available in repository, allowing this process to be implemented at the beginning of the workflow – when the publication is deposited.
Regarding the main national funder, FCT, the Search Portal provides project pages with all related publications to produce an automatic scientific report based on the funding information. FCT also benefits from this API integration, as the research outcomes are tracked and monitored through the OpenAIRE Monitor service (https://monitor.openaire.eu/fct-overview).
Related to this process is the inherent curatorship of metadata in order to facilitate systems interoperability, the ongoing promotion of self-archiving and make effective use of complementary information provided by this tool and, above all, better communicate and disseminate scientific results, leveraging open science one step further.
Some numbers in RCAAP
- 52 Institutional repositories
- 77 Institutions in the Common Repository
- 128 Scientific Journals
- 10825 FCT Projects
- 28867 Publications with FCT Projects
- 3274 Publications with EC Projects
- 37277 FCT Projects
- 50734 Publications with FCT Projects
- 5336 Publications with EC Projects
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