Más de 30 centros investigación españoles publican en abierto sus artículos

[Google transl.] More than 30 Spanish research centres publish their articles openly

More than 30 research centres, scientific societies and universities have joined the Open Access Institutional Programme (IOAP) of the Swiss publishing house MDPI, specialized in scientific articles, with offices in Barcelona, Belgrade, Basel, Beijing and Wuhan (China).

The head of the Barcelona publishing house, Antonio Peteira, explained that "our mission is to increase the free accessibility of science through open access scientific journals that facilitate scientific exchange".

The'open access' format is the model towards which the scientific literature is directed, which does not restrict access to or use of publications, and anyone can consult the information without having to subscribe to any scientific publication or journal.

Since 2014, when the IOAP was launched, in addition to the Spanish centres, more than 400 institutions from all over the world have joined the initiative, a collaboration that has resulted in discounts of up to 25% on publication fees, helping university research groups to disseminate their findings.

In this regard, Marta de la Mano, Director of the University of Salamanca's Library Service, said that "thanks to the 15% discount on the cost of publications obtained by authors, the number of articles published in the publishing house's journals is satisfactory".

The head of Research Support at the University of Seville, Almudena Pobil, stressed that "since the University joined the MDPI IOAP programme, the number of articles published in MDPI journals has multiplied, as thanks to this collaboration authors pay 25% less when publishing their articles".

The University of Seville publishes more than 30% of the studies in the'open access' format and the University of Barcelona (UB) joined the programme in 2014 and has doubled the number of open publications in the last six years.

"Thanks to the support of the European Commission (EC), as well as to the collaboration with MDPI, which offers a 25% discount to authors, and with other publishers, the UB already publishes 20% of its articles in an open access format," said Peteira.

Last year the European Union's Competitiveness Council agreed that all scientific articles published in Europe after 2020 should be in'open access' format, a goal which, according to Pobil,'will be difficult to achieve in Spain in the short term, because we need a little more time to reach the degree of maturity existing in countries such as the United Kingdom or Sweden', leaders in the implementation of the new model.