Repositório Aberto da Universidade do Porto: The U.Porto Open Repository: The Role of the Information System

Use the link to access the full text article from the institutional repository of the University of Porto.  The article is available in English.  The abstract reads as follows: "The creation and the dissemination of knowledge are nuclear to the mission of universities. As John Newman anticipated in his work 'The Idea of a University'1] Knowledge is capable of being its own end. We all know and experiment the influence of the new information and communication technologies (ICT) in our daily work and in the way we live in society. These technologies are having a tremendous impact on production and diffusion of knowledge. The open access movement for scholarly communication bears on the possibilities of Internet technologies, and institutional repositories on the Web are seen as new ways to support that primary constituent of the universities’ mission. In this work we will present the institutional repository of the University of Porto (U.PORTO) from its creation to the present moment, emphasizing its goals and the key factors that influenced most the adhesion of the academic community to self-archiving, allowing that from November 2007, when the repository was created, to present days the number of publications registered increased by an order of magnitude, the University of Porto now being the higher education institution in Portugal that offers more open access full text publications, over 11.000 documents. To achieve these results, the connection between the U.PORTO Information System, SIGARRA, to the DSPACE platform, that supports the University repository was decisive, and we will address its implications as well as the main directions for future developments."