RCAAP – The Portuguese Scientific Open Access Repository
I bring great news! A brand new, government funded (sort of), decently designed, totally open access, centralized repository was presented this week at the 3rd Open Access conference that took place at University of Minho on the 15 & 16th of December.
The new repository government-supported site for hosting multiple repositories which is currently indexing over 13091 documents from 10 repositories has been announced as a project funded by the Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC) and will be technically maintained by the National Scientific Computations Foundation (FCCN).
This looks like a cool project and I sincerely hope it gathers some momentum and becomes a useful resource.
The 10 repositories that are currently contributing to this main centralized repository are mainly university DSpace-based repositories or similar.
My university happens to show up on the list but is listed as contributing 0 documents. Yes, zero. Maybe it’s new.
This [zero docs] isn’t really a surprise since I had been considering submitting a proposal to set up a Dspace-based repository at my university earlier this year along with a buddy of mine. However, higher priority things took it’s place in my to-do list, like my thesis work.
Anyhow, I must congratulate everyone involved in this project and wish the best of luck. Maybe my thesis will be a part of this once it’s finally complete!
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RCAAP is not a repository, but a portal (joint interface) of multiple individual institutional repositories. (But why on earth restrict it to DSpace repositories only??)
Stevan, thanks for the comment but the site’s name says it’s a repository. I know that it is technically a portal that aggregates multiple repositories. And yes, from what I can see it’s overall DSpace based.
Hi,
The RCAAP portal accepts all the repositories that are OAI-PMH compliant, and it’s not a Dspace confederation ;-)
The name repository is only a conceptual idea of a nacional repository.
Eloy Rodrigues of U. Minho, the designer of Europe’s first university-wide Open Access Self-Archiving mandate and the creator of Europe’s most successful Institutional Repository, has informed me that RCAAP is in fact neither a portal nor a repository, but a government-supported site for hosting multiple repositories (for institutions that do not or cannot host their own repository locally).
The fact that most or all the repositories happen to be DSpace is simply the usual reflexive copycat effect: not knowing what institutional repositories [IRs] are for [they are for making institutional refereed research output Open Access, OA], one just copies what others seem to be doing.
In reality, the functionality of the other widely used free IR software, EPrints, is far more powerful, and is very specifically adapted for OA functionality and OA policy.
But the substantive problem is not what IR software is adopted, but whether an OA mandate is adopted. Without a mandate, the IRs are doomed to remain empty [baseline spontaneous -- i.e. unmandated -- deposit rate worldwide is and remains 15%].
So if you want to copy something, copy something that really works, and that is Minho’s OA mandate! (But adopt EPrints for creating your IR…
See ROARMAP
Hi Stevan, thanks again for the great input. Much appreciated!
While this government-supported site for hosting multiple repositories sounds terrific, I want you all to take advantage of a free online community to let you share research with other scientists.
Epernicus (www.Epernicus.com) already has close to 10,000 member life scientists at more than 1,800 institutions in 67 countries. It is not just in academia, but also in private industry and government institutions.
You can save a lot of time and effort tracking down scientists who could share information that you need. Think of it as kind of a Facebook or LinkedIn for life scientists.
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