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Spain

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The Spanish National Open Access Policy is based on three pillars: the legal framework set by the Spanish Science, Technology and Innovation Act, the National Aggregator for Open Access contents RECOLECTA, and the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) as the public institution that works in supporting the National Government in the design and in the implementation of the open access policy.

The Act 14/2011, of June 1, on Science, Technology and Innovation, which urges researchers to deposit the final digital version of their contributions to journals in an open access repository.

Article 37. Open access dissemination:

1. Public workers of the Spanish Science, Technology and Innovation System will drive forward the development of own or shared open access repositories for the publications of their researchers, and will establish systems allowing their connection to similar national or international initiatives.

2. Researchers whose research is financed mostly with funds from the General Budget of the State will make public a digital final version of the contents that have been accepted for publication in research journals, as soon as possible and no later than twelve months after the official date of publication.

3. The electronic version will be made public in open access repositories recognised in the field of knowledge of the research or in open access institutional repositories.

4. The public electronic version may be used by public administrations in their assessment procedures.

5. The Science and Innovation Ministry will facilitate centralized access to repositories and their connection to similar national or international initiatives.

6. The above is understood without prejudice of the agreements by virtue of which rights over the publications have been conferred or transferred to third parties, and will not be applied when the rights over the results of research, development and innovation are liable to protection.

The national calls for R&D projects carried out within the framework of the National Plans of Scientific, Technical and Innovation Research 2013-2016 and the Plan Estatal de Investigación Científica y Técnica y de Innovación 2017-2020 (in Spanish) are based on this legal framework.

The National Aggregator for Open Access contents RECOLECTA is the source of primary data to measure the degree of compliance with the national open access policy by researchers.

FECYT is the public agent of the state public sector dependent on the Ministry of Science and Innovation, which supports it in the work of implementation of the national policy of open access and in the design of the national policy of open science.

national overview

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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

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At the national level, most public funding is managed through the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (State Research Agency), which reports to the Ministry of Science and Innovation and to the Ministry of Universities. Some of the calls are also managed by national Institutes (i.e. the Centre for the Development of Industrial Technology (CDTI), the FECYT, the Instituto de Salud Carlos III, as well as others as the Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública).

The Spanish National Plan for Scientific and Technical Research and Innovation 2017-2020 (in Spanish Plan Estatal de Investigación Científica y Técnica y de Innovación 2017-2020) is the main instrument of the General State Administration for the development and achievement of the objectives of the Spanish Strategy for Science and Technology and Innovation 2013-2020 and the Europe 2020 Strategy, and includes state aid for the R+D+i, which are preferably granted through competitive calls.

The following link allows searching for calls, highlighting open calls: Call search

Additionally, to the national public options, there is also other regional or sectorial research funding offered by the different autonomous communities or specific institutions.

Finally, there are many research funding opportunities from Spanish private institutions; as well as crowdfunding options as Precipita, the FECYT platform for scientific fundraising.

 

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FECYT performs continuous educational activities and outreach for researchers, librarians, project managers, policy makers, etc. The offer includes expert training workshops, participation in seminars, conferences and training events, both face-to-face or in e-learning format. The subjects go from Open Access basics, policy development advice and repository managing, to research data management,

In addition, during 2019 FECYT organised two national workshops. The first one in June about The role of Biomedical libraries in the context of Open Access, hold at the National Library of Health Sciences of the Carlos III Health Institute (ISCIII), in Madrid. The second one was held in September in Leon with the title New OpenAIRE services for repository managers, aiming in particular to present the 4.0 Guidelines for Literature Repository Managers version and the new Dashboards for Content Providers.

To ask for a training or support session, don’t hesitate to contact us at openairespain@fecyt.es

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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

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