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Portugal

Open Access initiatives have been taken in Portugal since 2004 with the establishment of an OA self-archiving repository at University of Minho, followed by the 1st Open Access conference in 2005.  In 2005 the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO), a cooperative electronic scientific journal collection library was established between Latin America, Spain and Portugal.

In Portugal, the development of a solid and mature repository infrastructure, providing a range of relevant services and supporting an active OA community, around the Scientific Open Access Repository of Portugal - RCAAP - offered a solid basis to the definition and implementation of Open Access policies within research performing institutions and research funders. The majority of Portuguese Higher Education Institutions have an institutional repository as the main access point to their scientific output, and most of them also have defined Open Access policies requiring deposit into their institutional repositories.

Currently, there are strong and effective policies in Portugal, like the mandates from Instituto Politécnico de Bragança (IPB) and University of Minho, which link repository deposition with the institutional processes of reporting and evaluation. Over the last few years, and taking advantage of the participation in EC’s funded projects, OpenAIRE, MedOANet and PASTEUR4OA projects, an effort has been made to homogenise the OA policies in Portugal and align them all with the EC recommendations.

Other factors which contributed for the success of the infrastructure and policy initiatives were the strong advocacy strategy implemented in the RCAAP context, the focus on promoting interoperability, the adoption of DRIVER Guidelines, the use of the validator to periodically verify the repository compliance, and a helpdesk service to help institutions when needed. Finally, the Open Access mandate of the major public funder launched in May this year reinforced the idea that there remains room for development and improvement of Open Access issues in Portugal

As of June 2015, There are now 46 institutional and subject repositories in Portugal which are registered in OpenDOAR. 83 OA journals are indexed in DOAJ.

There are currently 21 OA policies registered in ROARMAP.

Portugal's major research funder FCT, Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, is the first national funder using the OpenAIRE data model and services for funding information. OpenAIRE has recently released, in a pilot stage, the identification of almost 7000 publications as outputs from FCT projects.

The FCT is the major Portuguese Science Funder and released in 2014 its Open Access policy much in line with the European Commission OA recommendations. The basic requirement of this funder OA policy is the deposit as soon as possible of “all publications of research outputs, subject to peer-review or another form of scientific review” into a repository hosted within RCAAP – the Portuguese Open Access Repositories Network. The policy applies to papers in scientific journals, conference proceedings, posters, books and book chapters, monographs, Masters and PhD theses.

Enabling Environment:

Portugal in a participant in Southern European Libraries Link (SELL). The Conference of Rectors of the Portuguese Universities (CRUP)   signed the Berlin Declaration in 2007 and Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (RCAAP) Portugal’s open access Science Repository established in 2008 that supports the OA environment in the country.

Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (RCAAP) has a mission to promote, support and facilitate the adoption of open access to scientific knowledge in Portugal. This mission is materialized on the following objectives: - Increase the visibility, accessibility and dissemination of results of academic activity and Portuguese scientific research; - Facilitate the management and access to information about the national scientific production; - Integrate Portugal a number of international initiatives.

Major Projects/Initiatives:

Repositories Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (RCAAP)

Provides support to repositories through the following services:  a national portal that indexes material; SARI a central infrastructure facility enabling institutional repositories to develop; a Repositories Validate, based on DRIVER guidelines that maintains standardisation. RCAAP also produces guidelines through an Open Access Policies Kit and uses social networking sites with pages on Facebook and Twitter.

University of Minho is in partnership with OpenAIRE

In a three-year project, will establish the infrastructure for researchers to support them in complying with the EC OA pilot and the ERC Guidelines on Open Access.

National and Institutional Level Policies/Mandates:

No national mandate exists at present, but there is a recommendation by CRUP (Conference of Rectors of the Portuguese Universities), and it is also a signatory to Berlin Declaration.

Thematic Open Access projects/Initiatives

Past and Future OA Related Activities:

  • The 5th Luso-Brasilien Open Access Conference took place in Coimbra, Portugal on 6-8 October 2014.  On the 8th of October, the Portuguese Task Force met to discuss best practices to develop and implement OA policies in the country and the recently launched OA policy of the public major funder (FCT), and also to be informed about the last developments regarding Open Access issues at national and international level. The project coordinator, Victoria Tsoukala also participated in the meeting. After the meeting, the participants had the opportunity to attend the workshop entitled "How to comply with the OA requirements of the Horizon2020" addressed by Eloy Rodrigues (University of Minho), Victoria Tsoukala (EKT, Greece), and Ana Luísa Silva (University of Coimbra).
  • 2015 April 14-16 Porto, Portugal : Joint SPARC-COAR Conference.  Organised by The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR)http://www.sparc.arl.org/events/joint-sparc-coar-conference
  • Introducing PRIME: Publisher, Repository and Institutional Metadata Exchange, OpenAIRE Interoperability Workshop, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal, February 8, 2013.
  • 6-8 February 2013: UMinho Open Access Seminar held in Braga, Portugal- Two workshops were organized:
    • The MedOANet European Workshop brought together decision-makers and task force representatives from the six Mediterranean countries: Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Greece and Turkey. OA experts and representatives of relevant European and international organizations and initiatives also took part. The workshop produced a final document with conclusions/recommendations on how to implement coordinated policies in line with the European Commission’s Open Access policies and initiatives in view of the current state of OA in the aforementioned countries.
    • The OpenAIRE workshop concentrated on interoperability between research infrastructures, namely between publication and data repositories. A fuller understanding of how data repositories can communicate with each other is an important milestone in OpenAIRE. The goals of the workshop were: 1) dissemination and awareness of OpenAIRE guidelines. This will include a discussion of uptake by national initiatives and identification of data initiatives; 2) a technical discussion about the challenges and approaches to interoperability faced by OpenAIRE. Selected data sources were presented and focused on discussions on how to create links, the challenges involved and how to prioritize. Other topics of discussion included metadata formats, usage statistics, unique IDs, input/output formats and interpretation of enhanced publications.
  • Portugal has held successful and influential conferences on OA.
  • Open Access week events and seminars aimed at promoting OA awareness are coordinated through University of Minho.

Open Science and Open Data Related Events

February 2016: MARES Conference, Open Science Training Workshop

This workshop drew on the expertise from the FP7 FOSTER (Facilitate Open Science Training for European Research) Consortium and provided participants with a comprehensive introduction to Open Science.

The training content was structured around FOSTER Open Science Learning Objectives for young researchers.

The main objectives of the workshop were to ensure that:

  • Participants gained an understanding of what Open Science is and how it can benefit their research and career opportunities;

Participants learned where and how to submit OA publications and data in OA journals or OA repositories.

List of Publications

March 2015: "Academic Publishing in Portugal: Threats and Major opportunities" by Delfim Leao (Director, Coimbra University Press, Portugal) Published in Insights 28(1).

17 November 2014: "Portugal Open Access Policy Landscape (Pasteur 4OA Project)"- This case study includes a brief description of the Portuguese higher education and research systems, followed by a short history of the development of Open Access policies in the country, including all aspects of implementation and supported infrastructures. It concludes listing some challenges and ongoing developments.

July 19, 2013: Richard Poynder interview- Eloy Rodrigues on the state of Open Access: Where are we, what still needs to be done? -This was the sixth Q&A in a series exploring the current state of Open Access (OA). On this occasion the questions were answered by Eloy Rodrigues, Portuguese librarian and Director of the University of Minho’s Documentation Services.

Correia, A.M.R and Neto, M.C (2002) The Role of Eprint Archives in the Access to, and Dissemination of, Scientific Grey Literature: LIZA—A Case Study by the National Library of Portugal. Journal of Information Science Vol 28, 3: 231–41.

Correia, A.M.R and Teixeira, J.C (2005) Reforming scholarly publishing and knowledge communication: From the advent of the scholarly journal to the challenges of Open Access Information Services & Use Vol. 25, 13–21. Journal of Information Science Vol 28, 3: 231–41. doi: 10.1108/14684520510617802

Harnad, S. (2005) The Implementation of the Berlin Declaration on Open Access. D-lib Magazine, 11 (3).

Moreira, J M  RCAAP: Portuguese Open Access. Scientific Repository. 5th UNICA Scholarly Communication Seminar.

Pinto, M J and Fernandez, S The library’s role in the quality and excellence in higher education: a Portuguese case study, QQML2011: Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries, International Conference, Athens Greece, 24-27 May 2011.

Saraiva, R and Rodrigues, E (2009). Open access in Portugal: a state of the art report. RCAAP: Braga, Portugal.

 

 

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