Portugal

OPEN ACCEES ACTIVITIES IN SELL(SOUTHERN EUROPEAN LIBRARIES LINK)

COUNTRIES



B. Karasözen

Library Director of Middle East Technical University

Ankara-Turkey



bulent@metu.edu.tr





Abstract: This report describes the recent Open Acess activities in SELL(Southern European

Libraries Link) countries http://www.heal-link.gr/SELL/index.html. SELL

was created in 2001 in Thessalonica, Greece as an effort to bring together Libraries from

Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece and Turkey. Since then, representatives from the SELL

countries meet each year at different places to discuss the development of consortial

activities and exchange ideas about current issues in the scientific publishing area and

scholary communication. At E-ICOLC meeting the consortial activities in each country are

reported and SELL countries acting collectively about the price increases and other

ineffieniences at the publishing market by announcing several statements http://www.heal-

link.gr/SELL/statement.htm. There are several activities concerning open acess and

institutional repositories in these countries which will be reported here shortly.



Institutional repositories:







In Spain at the CBUC(Consortium of Academic Libraries of Catalonia) a thesis and

disserations online server TDX, www.tdx.cbuc.es was set up in 2001. About 2000 fultext

dissertations are available, the TDX is implementing the OAI standarts since 2003. Since

then the number of the monthly downloads increased from 15.000 to 80.000. In 2004 CBUC

formed a study group for selecting a software for the institutional repository. It was

recommended to use the DSpace software for the implementation of the institutional

repository which will start soon.



In Portugal the first institutional repository at the University of Minho RepositóriUM

https://repositorium.sdum.uminho.pt/index.jsp was set up in 2003, as the first Portuguese

version of Dspace. A report describes the first ten months of the implementation and

experience with the repository [1]. In November 2003 the reposiory was made public, and

after one year of operation the repository was accessed by more than 50.000 diferent users

(from Portugal, UE, USA and Braazil), and the total number of documents deposited is 620 -

mostly thesis and dissertations, research papers (postprints), working papers and technical

reports. University announced, in 6 December 2004, a formal policy, established by a

Rectoral Document, mandating that its faculty deposit their research (with a few exceptions),

and that grad students deposit their theses and dissertations, in the university's open-access

repository.This policy is expected to have a significant impact on the number of documents

deposited and use of RepositóriUM. A copyright/self-archiving rights help to authors have

been developed, using the Romeo project information. Studies about usage statistics,

bibliographic and bibliometric reports metadata creation for e–learning environments,

surveying attitudes and behaviors and researchers towards the use of repository and

submission of a proposal for EU funding are ongoing activities. It may be an example for the

whole Portuguese speaking community of 200 million people worldwide.

On the same time the National Library of Portugal, BN, developed the service DiTeD - Digital

Thesis and Dissertations (http://dited.bn.pt), to support the digital deposit of these works. The

service is supported by an open source system developed by BN, named DEPTAL

(http://deptal.bn.pt), available under the GNU license. DiTeD is synchronized with the

national union catalogue, PORBASE (http://www.porbase.org), and its records are available

for harvesting by OAI-PMH, especially to the Networked Digital Library of Thesis and

Dissertations (http://www.ndltd.org). BN is also offering local installations of DEPTAL (using

its own servers) for institutional repositories of universities with no possibilities to host

Internet servers.





Italy is very active in establishing institutional respositories, providing services and

infrastucture to the open access community. With the last two years 15 institutional

repositories have been established which are distributed among universities, research

centers and two supercomputing consortia like CLIEA(Consorzio Interuniversitario

Lombardo per L'Elaborazione Automatica) in Milan and CASPUR(Consorzio

interuniversitario per le Applicazioni di Supercalcolo per Universita e Ricerca) in Rome. The

OA software mostly used is Eprints, but there are few installations of DSpace and CDSware.

In general the digital contents deposited are pre-print/post print articles, conference

proceedings, teaching material, doctoral theses, working papers and technical notes. The

number of the deposited material is not growing at the same speed as the number of the

repositories. Therefore some universities are thinking about the making deposition of

teaching and research material mandatory by allocating some funds to the departments

which are interested. CASPUR and CILEA are supporting universities for selection,

implementation and evaluation of open archives by providing technical and managerial

expertise. CILEA is also hosting institutional archives or OA journals for those universities

which do not have the staff or the technical competence to handle them. CILEA also hosts a

website "AEPIC- Academic E-Publishing Infrastructure" where different type of information

and material related to OA issues are made available in Italian and English. Both CILEA and

CASPUR signed the Berlin Declaration; CNR- Pisa has developed in an open source

environment several services for research centres within the framework of an EU project.

SISSA (International School for Advanced Studies) in Trieste developed Torii a prototype for

searching multiple OA archives and evaluating documents. The research centres are actively

involved in this area, developing services and programs in support of the academic and

research community. In particular the CNR- Pisa has developed in an open source

environment several services.



There are several EU funded projects in Greece which are running until 2006. Six digital

collections exists in the fields literature, philosopy, art and newspapers, periodicals with

content in Greek language:



 The Files of the Greek Palingenesis 1821-1832, carried out by the Greek Parliament

www.parliament.gr/paligenesia/

 Kosmopolis, a digital collection with 19th – early 20th century Greek literature

periodicals, a project implemented by Library & Information Service of the University

of Patras, www.lis.upatras.gr/kosmopolis/

 Hellinomnimon, a digital library of all the philosophical and scientific manuscripts

written in Greek from 1600 to 1821, created by the Laboratory for the Electronic

Processing of Historical Archives of the University of Athens

www.iono.noa.gr/hellinomnimon/index.html

 Digital Library of Newspapers & Periodicals, by the National Library of Greece,

www.nlg.gr/dlefimerides.htm

 Panathinaia journal, by the Athens School of Fine Arts,

www.library.asfa.gr/panathinea/tomos1/tom_1.htm

 Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Digital Collection of Dissertations and Digitized

Articles from Newspapers & Periodicals with literary criticism of the modern Greek

literature. The software used is CDSware (OAI complaint). During the past year and

a half 436 dissertations and 11.585 full text articles have been loaded. Begining

Spring 2005 the University Library will start digitizing manuscripts of the modern

Greek authors from the collections of the School of Humanities

http://cds.lib.auth.gr/



The majority of the known collections and services do not implement the OAI standardization,

as they use tailor- made solutions or commercial applications based on various or none

widely accepted standards. The only known collections which implementing OAI standards

are the digital collection Kosmopolis and the Aristotle University Digital Collection. There is

also a repository called Hellenic Ph.D. Dissertations Thesis, by the National Documentation

Center http://argo.ekt.gr/Argo/ArgoENU.html





Two universities from Turkey, Bilkent University with currently over 700 and Middle East

Technical University with over 1200 theses providing free electronic access. Both are

members of NDLTD(Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations).



Open Access journals and e-publishing:



In Spain a project was started in 2004 to make the Catalan scientific and cultural journals

available online. There are currently 30 journals with full text articles in its TOC Database at

sumaris.cbuc.es/.



Italy is lagging behind with reference to e-publishing of journals and monographs as well as

with the digitization of back files of journals or documents. There are various OA journals

published by the Italian academic and scientific community, these journals are often not

compliant to OAI-MPH or to any standard and in some case are not peer-reviewed. There

was a very interesting experiment carried out by SISSA (Scuola Internazionale Superiore di

Studi Avanzati) with the OA journal peer reviewed JHEP, Journal of High Energy Physics.

This journal is often cited by commercial publishers as an example of economic non-

sustainability of OA. This OA journal did not receive enough funding to stay alive and

eventually was given to IOPP which now distributes it and charges for it. SISSA is working

on new OA journals. Costs of producing of OA peer reviewed journal are an issue in Italy too.



In Turkey the twelfe scientific journals in mathematics, natural sciences, engineering,

medicine and agriculture of TUBITAK(Turkish Scientific and Research Council) are freely

available electronically http://journals.tubitak.gov.tr/index.html. All of them are in English and

are indexed by various abstracting and indexing databases, but they are not OA-compliant.

At the Turkish Academic Network and Information Center (ULAKBIM)

http://uvt.ulakbim.gov.tr/uvt/ majority of journals published in Turkish in the areas medicine,

engineering, Agriculture and Social Sciences are indexed with TOC pages and abstracts,

some of them providing free full text access.



In Portugal the National Digital Library is promoting a digitization project that will bring to the

public a large amount of historical newspapers and scientific journals in partnerships such as

with the Portuguese Mathematical Society and the Portuguese Chemical Society.





Promotion & Advocacy



In Italy, CASPUR, University La Sapienza, Rome; in Spain , Universidad de Las Palmas de

Gran Canaria, Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya and in Turkey ANKOS(Anatolian

University Library Consortium) are members of SPARC Europa. Bülent Karasözen, director

of ANKOS was elected to the Board of Directories of SPARC Europa in 2004 as SELL

countries representative. SPARC’s ‘Create a Change’ declaration was translated into

Catalan, Spanish, Italian, Turkish and description of SPARC in Italian are available on

SPARC Europe website.



In Portugal, a site about Open Access in Portuguese language

(http://www.sdum.uminho.pt/site/acessolivre) was created by Minho University, in April 2004.

The same University made available the Portuguese version of the DSpace software that

they translated and used for RepositóriUM, to other universities and organizations in Portugal

and Brazil. To promote the use of DSpace software in the Portuguese speaking community,

the site LusoDSpace (http://www.lusodspace.sdum.uminho.pt) was also created and

launched in September 2004.



Minho University as also signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to knowledge in the

Sciences and Humanities in 30 November of 2004, and made available a Portuguese version

of that document (https://repositorium.sdum.uminho.pt/about/DeclaracaoBerlim.htm).



In Portugal, the National Library, as member of the consortium B-on (http://www.b-on.pt), is

proposing its services for the digital deposit and open access to all the kinds of national STM

publications.





In order to promote the OA movement in Italy, several conferences and workshops have

been organized by CNR- Pisa, Bologna, CILEA, University of Parma, and University of

Florence since 2002. A conference promoted by the Italian Council of Rectors was held in

Messina on November 4-5 2004 where over 32 Italian universities signed the Berlin

Declaration on Open Access to knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. The

event promoted by the Council of the Italian Rectors (CRUI), was attended by 250 persons

and by representatives of over 35 universities: rector's delegates, professors, university

librarians and IT people involved in OA www.aepic.it/conf/index.php?cf=1 .



SELL members decided to coordinate all these open access activities in their next meeting in

May 2004 in Portugal.



References



[1] E. Rodrigues, A.Alice Baptista, I. Ramos, M. Fernanda Sarmento e Soauza,

‘Repositorium-Implementing Dspace in Portuguese: Lessons from the future and research

pathways’, 8th ICCC International Conference on Electronic Publishing Brasilia - DF, Brazil

June 2004