RCAAP celebrates 10 years

The Portuguese Open Access Scientific Repositories (RCAAP) initiative is celebrating its 10th anniversary.

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

Over the past 10 years, RCAAP has provided open access infrastructure to a network of more than 130 national higher education institutions and over 70 scientific journals. Thanks to this extensive network, it has been possible to create a community working towards a common goal: the practice of open access. 

Over the last decade, RCAAP has become the tool for supporting the legal deposit of theses and dissertations. Open access scientific output has increased substantially. There are currently more than 500,000 open access documents on RCAAP, with the number of downloads exceeding 15 million per year, originating from more than 150 countries and territories around the world. This fulfills the role of exporting national scientific knowledge.

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

About RCAAP:

RCAAP – Repositórios Científicos de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Portuguese Open Access Scientific Repositories) is a national open access initiative that aims to store, preserve, and promote access to scientific knowledge produced in Portugal.

Through the RCAAP portal, you can access thousands of scientific journal articles, papers, theses, and dissertations scattered across numerous Portuguese repositories belonging to national higher education institutions and other R&D organizations.

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

The initiative was initially promoted by UMIC – Agency for the Knowledge Society and implemented by the National Scientific Computing Unit of FCT, with the support of the University of Minho, entities that have been ensuring the operation of RCAAP throughout the ten years that are now being celebrated.