Spain
Spain currently has around 50 institutional repositories which means about 200.000 open access documents, mainly textual, but also multimedia and learning materials. Universities are leading the movement, but there are also research institutions, like the Spanish Council of Research, departments, and even private organizations involved in the development of different kinds of open access initiatives. There is also a great interest in open access publishing, not without debate, among the researchers themselves and with publishers whilst copyright remains a big issue.
Spain has two open access portals that harvest oai-pmh Spanish repositories:
one is supported by the Minister of Education and it is national in scope;
the other -"e-ciencia portal"- is supported by the Madrid Regional
Government and harvest the 7 public Universities of the Autonomous Community
of Madrid plus the National Distance Education University of Spain and
the Spanish Council of Research; This portal is working to be compliant
with the DRIVER guidelines. Next October, the National Network of Academic
and Research Libraries of Spain (REBIUN) will launch the test-bed for
the national open access research portal, with the support of the Ministery
of Science and Education of Spain. To support the interoperability and
use of international standards in the development of the institutional
repositories, REBIUN has translated the DRIVER Guidelines into Spanish
and is translating the DINI certificate document as part of the project.
Those two documents will be the base to establish the requirements to
participate in the national portal to Spanish research.
The most used open software in Spain is Dspace, followed by E-prints;
UNED (National Distance Education University of Spain) is using Fedora
and Fez as a web client.
Open Access is growing in momentum in Spain and the interest and support
from Governments and authorities, with the strong activism of libraries
and many independent researchers throughout the country allows us to anticipatean
increase of the number of repositories and also the number of available
documents.
Both the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Education are funding
and supporting open access initiatives to make Spanish cultural and scientific
heritage available online. The Ministry of Culture is funding (2 million
euros) projects to digitalize, preserve and disseminate through open repositories
the cultural Spanish heritage. The Ministry of Education , through the
"Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología",
FECYT is funding projects all across Spain to promote the dissemination
of Spanish scientific results, both supporting the creation of Institutional
repositories (and harvester portals) and also promoting the publication
in open access journals.
The portal "e-ciencia" of the Autonomous Community of Madrid
has translated the licence to publish from the Zwolle project. There is
also a project to translate the Sherpa/romeo database interface into Spanish.
The "Consortium Madroño" (all public academic university
Libraries of the Autonomous Comunity of Madrid and the Open University
of Spain -UNED), has a blog
on "Open Access", supported by the Madrid Regional Government,
where you can find news and follow local discussions related with open
access and institutional repositories initiatives in Spain.
Os
repositorios is a distribution list, created by an independent group
(Grupo de trabajo para implementación repositorios open access)
of librarians, researchers and different people from different types of
institutions in Spain, to discuss matters and disseminate national and
international initiatives around the implementation of open access repositories.
Both the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Education are funding and supporting Open Access initiatives to make Spanish cultural and scientific heritage available online. The Ministry of Culture is investing 2 million euros to fund projects that aim to digitalize, preserve and disseminate through Open Access repositories the cultural Spanish heritage. The Ministry of Education, through FECYT (the "Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología") is funding projects across Spain to promote the dissemination of Spanish scientific results, thus supporting the creation of Institutional repositories (and harvester portals) and also promoting the publication in OA journals.
The DRIVER wiki may be a useful source of further information.
Are there developments in this country that you would like to inform the DRIVER community about? If so, please visit the DRIVER wiki. There you will find guest editors' contributions to the countries pages. Information about the easy process of editing pages and how to obtain a password can be found on the wiki under "PmWiki Software". We look forward to your visit.
Last updated: 14-Nov-2008