Paulo Lopes, manager of RCAAP – Open Access Scientific Repositories of Portugal, tells us all about the key steps taken by this FCCN service, which registered over 25 million downloads in 2022. Another highlight is RCAAP's role in achieving Open Science goals.
RCAAP is open to all institutions in the Portuguese science and higher education system. What does an institution gain by formalizing this membership?
THE RCAAP – Open Access Scientific Repositories of Portugal is the national open access initiative and aims to store, preserve, and promote access to scientific knowledge produced in Portugal. The institutions that make up the RCAAP network benefit from the three main objectives of this service.
First and foremost, they increase the visibility, accessibility, and dissemination of the results of Portuguese academic activity and scientific research. The creation and provision of a meta-repository of Portuguese scientific and academic production, enabling easy and intuitive search, access, and use, has been a significant asset, both nationally and for each of the participating institutions.
On the other hand, it is possible to facilitate access to information on national scientific production through the interconnection and interoperability of the meta-repository with other components of the Science, Technology, and Higher Education information system. National scientific production repositories are interconnected and interoperate with other components of these systems, especially with the curriculum management system— CIÊNCIAVITAE.
Finally, RCAAP allows Portugal to join a set of international initiatives that aim to facilitate interoperability and interconnection with the growing number of research centers, research funding bodies, and higher education institutions with repositories of this type that have proliferated in Europe and around the world.
Are there any numbers or statistics you can share to illustrate the activity of this service?
RCAAP's activities are constantly monitored, and several indicators attest to the service's activity. I'll share the most relevant ones, which relate to usage indicators. Currently, RCAAP aggregates more than 878,000 documents from 27 repositories hosted on the SARI service, 35 scientific journals hosted on the SARC service, 95 communities hosted on the Common Repository, 26 self-managed repositories, and 178 self-managed scientific journals. It also aggregates more than 1,970,000 documents from the Brazilian aggregator, OASIS.BR. These aggregated documents generated more than 25 million downloads.
RCAAP has played an important role in promoting the adoption of the open access movement to scientific knowledge in Portugal. What are some of the main recent achievements in this regard?
Currently, the vast majority of institutional repositories have their own open access policies and have adopted regulations and practices that promote open access and interoperability between systems. Many institutions are connecting their repositories to science management systems to enable the integrated management of all their scientific output. The community is highly participatory and frequently contributes to the adoption and dissemination of open science practices. Changes have also been observed in the editorial field of journals that have led to the adoption of open science practices, such as open peer review, continuous publishing, the introduction of persistent identifiers for publications (DOI) and authors (ORCID), CC-BY 4.0 licensing, and the possibility of allowing the publication of preprints.
The open access movement seeks to achieve significant changes. Do you think the scientific and educational system in Portugal is closer to achieving this movement's goals today?
The road ahead is long, requiring changes, the adoption of new practices, regulatory policies for open access, and tough negotiations with major content publishers. However, the Portuguese education system is now closer to the goals of the Open Science and Open Access movements, and RCAAP plays an important role in achieving these goals.
What are the next steps planned for RCAAP?
Efforts over the next three years will be focused primarily on migrating the SARI service to the new version of the repository software, DSPace 7. This is a radically different version from the previous one and will pose significant challenges in terms of resource migration, repository management, and usage.
This will also be a period during which RCAAP will support development of the new backend version of the RCAAP Portal, specifically with regard to a management and control interface for the aggregation and indexing of information from repositories. This will allow managers of these resources to monitor and correct these processes themselves. Finally, a new frontend interface for the RCAAP Portal will also be developed.
