RCAAP celebrates 10 years

Portugal's 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 Rectory of the University of Coimbra.

Over these 10 years, RCAAP has managed to make open access infrastructures available to a network of more than 130 national higher education institutions and more than 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. 

In this decade, RCAAP has become the instrument to support the legal deposit of theses and dissertations. Scientific production in open access has increased substantially. There are currently more than 500,000 open access documents on RCAAP, with more than 15 million downloads a year, from more than 150 countries and territories around the world. This fulfills the role of exporting national scientific knowledge.

In these 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 in the "European cloud of scientific knowledge", the EOSC (European Open Science Cloud).

About RCAAP:

RCAAP - Portugal's Open Access Scientific Repositories is the national open access initiative and 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, communications, theses and dissertations that are scattered throughout numerous Portuguese repositories of national higher education entities and other R&D organizations.

RCAAP also offers Portuguese scientific institutions and communities hosting services for repositories and open access journals, and has been extending 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 operationalized by FCT's National Scientific Computing Unit, with the support of the University of Minho, entities that have ensured the operation of RCAAP over the ten years that are now being celebrated.