Open Access Scientific Repository of Portugal (RCAAP) Present at Conference in Beijing

Eloy Rodrigues presented at this conference the communication Open Access in Portugal: Recent Evolution and Current Situation and also the communication Brazilian endeavours towards open access: initiatives through the green and gold roads; launching the blue road, at the request of the authors, Selye Costa (University of Brasilia), Fernando Leite (University of Brasilia), Bianca Amaro (IBICT – Brazilian Institute of Science and Technology Information), who could not be at the conference.

The Ministers of Science and Technology of Portugal and Brazil signed a year ago a Memorandum of Understanding (see Signing of Protocols on Cooperation in Science, Technology and Information Society between Portugal and Brazil) which, among other things, provides for the joint promotion of the extension of open/free access scientific repositories in both countries through their integration, the joint development of an integrated search and metadata system covering both countries, and the organization of an annual joint international meeting on open/free access scientific repositories whose first materialization is the 1st Luso-Brazilian Conference on Open Access to be held on 25-26 November 2010 at the University of Minho.

The project of creation of the Open Access Scientific Repository of Portugal (RCAAP) was conceived by the Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC) and implemented in the Foundation for National Scientific Computing (FCCN) with the support of a team of University of Minho in the 2nd semester of 2008, with the aim of providing one more advanced service over the NREN – National Research and Education Network, run by FCCN. The project was funded by the Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC) and the Knowledge Society Operational Programme. Given its design, it could satart operation less than half a year after being initiated, integrating at the outset 12 institutional repositories, of which 4 had directly resulted from the RCAAP project itself, and providing at the time more than 13,000 documents, i.e., 50% more that only half a year before when the project had not yet begun; it was a great success.

The RCAAP allowed a coherent integration of metadata of these repositories and those located in other scientific or higher education institution, as well as with those housed in the technology platform provided at FCCN to any scientific or higher education institution at no cost to these institutions.

Furthermore, on the 27th November, 2006, the CRUP – Council of Rectors of Portuguese Universities signed the BerlinDeclaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities.

The RCAAP already has 29 institutional repositories, covering all the public universities, some private universities, polytechnics, state laboratories and research institutions, and including more than 47,000 documents, when at the beginning of 2008 Portugal had only three institutional repositories with 7,300 documents. That is, in less than three years the number of institutional repositories increased tenfold, the number of documents increased sevenfold and the coverage of all national public university system was assured.

Portugal is currently one of the leading countries in the movement of repositories of open access scientific repositories, by the institutional scope and the number of records that RCAAP holds, and by the level of integration including the whole the country that allows from a single search window to seek access to documents of any of the Portuguese institutional repositories. For example, it is possible to have immediate access to about 4,500 doctoral theses, 11,700 master theses, 2,100 undergraduate theses, 17,200 articles, 7,400 conference documents, 1,400 books, 1,000 reports