Case Study: Portugal Open Access Policy Landscape | PASTEUR4OA
pontika.nancy@gmail.com's bookmarks 2014-12-08
Summary:
"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. 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."