Up and Away: Open Access in Portugal (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUCAUSE.edu

Use the link to access the full text article published in Educause Review.  The article opens as follows: "As open access (OA) continues to gain momentum worldwide, perhaps a dozen countries have more ardently embraced the globe-spanning revolution in scholarly communication. Outside the United States, the countries of Australia, Brazil, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, Norway, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom are in the vanguard. Portugal, however, stands out because of its early adoption of institutional policies, creation of a vast network of repositories, and robust system of governance. Shortly after the historical signing of the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) in February 2002, the Portuguese academic community began to persuade university administrators of the merits of providing barrier-free access to the works produced by scholars at their home institutions. As in most countries throughout the world, universities in Portugal had simply run up against the proverbial wall and could no longer afford the spiraling journal subscription prices that conventional for-profit publishers were demanding. Informed by interviews with three individuals at the forefront of the open access movement in Portugal, this article chronicles its trajectory over the past decade, providing an inspiring account of how local engagement through effective policies and infrastructure development is facilitating an unprecedented open and free exchange of knowledge. To appreciate the significance of Portugal's accomplishments in the domain of open access, glance stateside at some of the most established institutional repositories in the United States. According to ROARMAP, or the Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies, Portugal has just three fewer "full" institutional mandates in place than the United States — a country with 30 times the number of people and with thousands more postsecondary institutions.2 While the United States may have more repositories, most faculty have not experienced the benefits of archiving their publications in institutional repositories, the path known as green OA. DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard) is the name of the central repository for Harvard where the first OA policy was voted in by Arts & Sciences faculty in 2008. While more than 30 institutions worldwide, including Stanford's School of Education and Iceland's Bifröst University, have adopted the Harvard model for providing open access to their research today, DASH contains fewer than 9,000 documents.3 DSpace at MIT, where the first faculty-driven, university-wide institutional policy of its kind in the United States was unanimously approved and implemented in 2009, contains roughly the same number of documents as Harvard, if you exclude the historical thesis collection of 30,000 that has been digitized back to the mid-19th century.4 Probably the closest analog in student and faculty populations to the Portuguese system of public universities and research institutes is the University of California. The 10 campuses of the UC system include more than 220,000 students and employ more than 170,000 faculty and staff.5 In academic year 2009–10, enrollment at Portugal's 14 public universities, 15 polytechnic institutes, and 16 nonintegrated polytechnic schools, which comprise the Portuguese public system of higher education, was 281,000 with about 39,869 faculty and staff.6 The UC system's central digital repository, eScholarship, which has existed since 2002, hosts at present more than 51,251 documents, ranging from postprints, books, working papers, conference proceedings, and dissertations. Compare that with the 101,499 in RCAAP, or the Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Scientific Open Access Repository of Portugal), and it would seem that the UC system is falling behind in open access archiving, particularly since many UC faculty are nonteaching researchers ..."