Access to Part of b-on Made Available to the University of Cape Verde

This is a unique initiative to make part of the Online Scientific Library (b-on) of Portugal available to an African country where Portuguese is an official language, based on negotiations with international scientific publishers, at a level involving the whole academic higher educational community in Portugal, to ensure a means of subscription known in the area as a “big deal”, to ensure conditions facilitating access by a university of another country.

This protocol envisages the availability of free electronic access by professors, researchers and students of the University of Cape Verde to full texts published in academic publications of a set of international publishers selected by the University of Cape Verde (Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Sage, Taylor&Francis, Association of Computing Machinery), a total of 2,069 titles, mostly scientific journals, with access ensured under the scope of the Online Scientific Library (b-on) of Portugal.

The protocol also ensures access by the University of Cape Verde to a referential bibliographical database from the publisher Association of Computing Machinery containing more than 1 million records.

The b-on library has been available in Portugal since 2004, managed by Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC) from the Ministry for Science, Technology and Higher Education, with its technical and operational management ensured by the Foundation for National Scientific Computation (FCCN – Fundação para a Computação Científica Nacional), and it is heavily used on a daily basis by the Portuguese academic and scientific community.

The content subscriptions to which b-on provides access are contracted directly with the various international publishers by FCCN which, within the scope of the cooperation formalised under the present protocol, negotiated with a selection of these publishers, as specified by the University of Cape Verde, to extend the availability of their content to the University through b-on under facilitated financial conditions.

The National Communications Authority (ICP - ANACOM), under the scope of the cooperation Programmeme and under the terms of the present protocol, has in 2009 subsidised the added subscription costs with the publishers as a result of making this respective content available to the University of Cape Verde.

This protocol provides the University of Cape Verde with electronic access to an important set of international sources of scientific knowledge, thus significantly increasing the working conditions of the academic and scientific community of this University, in a much easier and more economical fashion that would have been the case with the classical paper format for such content.

The cooperation now formalised between Portuguese institutions and the University of Cape Verde is an exemplary demonstration of the desire to cooperate in the important area of Knowledge, which currently plays a key role in social and economic development, and the global affirmation of peoples through the capacities of their citizens.

Distribution of b-on Titles Made Available to the U. of Cape Verde
Titles grouped according to scientific areas (%)

Alternative access:
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Source: FCCN.