RCAAP celebrates 10 years

The Open Access Scientific Repositories of Portugal (RCAAP) initiative is celebrating 10 years of existence.

The event was marked on Monday, December 17th, with an event in the auditorium of the University of Coimbra's Rectory.

Over these 10 years, RCAAP has managed to provide open access infrastructures to a network of more than 130 national higher education institutions and more than 70 scientific journals. Thanks to this extended network, it has been possible to create a community working towards a common goal: the practice of open access. 

In this decade, RCAAP became the support tool for the legal deposit of theses and dissertations. Scientific production in open access has increased substantially. Currently there are more than 500 thousand open access documents in RCAAP, with the number of downloads exceeding 15 million per year, from more than 150 countries and territories around the world. This fulfills its role of exporting national scientific knowledge.

In these 10 years, it has become possible to integrate the national scientific content of Portuguese institutions in the European and international context, through OpenAIRE (Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe) and also in the "European scientific knowledge cloud", the EOSC (European Open Science Cloud).

About RCAAP:

RCAAP - Open Access Scientific Repositories of Portugal is the national open access initiative and aims to store, preserve, promote access to scientific knowledge produced in Portugal.

Through the RCAAP portal you can access thousands of scientific journal articles, communications, theses and dissertations which are scattered across numerous Portuguese repositories of national higher education entities and other R&D organizations.

RCAAP also provides Portuguese scientific institutions and communities with hosting services for repositories and open access journals, and has been expanding its intervention to other areas of open science, such as the management and sharing of research data.

The initiative was initially promoted by the Knowledge Society Agency (UMIC) and made operational by the FCT's National Scientific Computing Unit, with the support of the University of Minho, entities that have been ensuring the operation of RCAAP for the ten years now being celebrated.