Open Access in Spain

Repositories | Organisations | Projects | Journals | Copyright | Funding | Publishers | News | Other

Open Access Repositories

Spain currently has around 50 institutional repositories which means about 200.000 open access documents, mainly textuals, 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; copyright is a big issue here.

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 having a momentum in Spain and the interest and support from Gorvenments and authorities, with the strong activism of libraries and many independent researchers throughout the country allows us to expect an increase of the number of repositories and also the number of documents.

Open Access Organisations/Groups

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Open Access Projects/Initiatives

Both the Ministery of Culture and the Ministery of Education are funding and supporting open access initiatives to make Spanish cultural and scientific heritage available online. The Ministery of Culture is funding (2 million euros) projects to digitalize, preserve and disseminate through open repositories the cultural Spanish heritage. The Ministery 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.

Open Access Journals

From October 10, 2008 the Portal de Revistas Científicas Complutenses is already conform to OAI-PMH protocol. The URL base is http://revistas.ucm.es/phpoai2/oai2.php. Right now, the Portal de Revistas Científicas Complutenses has access to 72 journals with 25.000 full text.

Copyright

The portal "e-ciencia" of the Autonomous Community of Madrid has translated the licence to publish from the Zwolle project. Other work has translated the Sherpa RoMEO database interface into Spanish http://www.recolecta.net/romeo/index.php.

Funding Policies

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Publishers and Open Access

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Current Local News & Events

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. http://weblogs.madrimasd.org/openaccess/

Os repositorios http://listserv.rediris.es/archives/os-repositorios.html 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.

Other Topics

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Contributor's contact details

Alicia López Medina (Open University of Spain -UNED) e-mail: alopezm@pas.uned.es 00-34-913986633