Spain
Spain has been developing OA repositories since 2000 and now has 65 OA repositories (mostly institutional) and participates in regional consortia such as Southern European Libraries Link (SELL). Spain has 383 journals on DOAJ, most of which have a self-archiving facility.
Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) is Spain’s National Research Council, the largest public research performing institution. A State Agency since 2007, it is a huge organization consisting of 130+ centers and institutes. CSIC Presidency signed the Berlin Declaration in 2006. As a result, the Council set the foundations for its green (Digital.CSIC) and gold (Revistas CSIC) routes.
Enabling Environment:
Spain has a demonstrated commitment to Open Access through legislation (Law on Science, Technology and Innovation, 2011) and a national funding mandate through Ministry of Science and Innovation and the regional funding bodies in Madrid and Asturias. There is a vibrant OA journal publishing environment, a network of OA repositories and a number of platforms to increase awareness of Spanish publications e.g. RACO, Scielo España and e-Revistas and RECYT.
Major Projects/Initiatives:
Digital.CSIC
Launched in January 2008, Digital.CSIC repository is coordinated by CSIC Unit of Scientific Resources for Research (URICI) and is part of “Frames” Action Line in CSIC Strategic Plan 2010-2013. The new Law of Science includes article 37 over the requirement to self-archive publications resulting from research projects that have been funded by General Public Budget, which in practice is an open access mandate for most CSIC research outputs.
CSIC hosted the seminar that led to the making of Alhambra Declaration in May 2010. In October 2011, URICI and Digital.CSIC organised a meeting that convened all State-funded Research Organizations (OPIs) and Spain’s Ministry of Science and Innovation to discuss over open access advances in each institution and implementation of new Law of Science. Collaboration with other publicly funded research institutions at European level takes place through participation in EUROHORCS and ESF Open Access activities. CSIC is a member of COAR.
Digital.CSIC organises, preserves and enables access to a wide variety of scientific outputs and counts with the active participation of CSIC scientific community and its network of 73 research libraries. This library network manages a large digital collection including 9,000+ e-journals, 220,000 e-books, databases and scientific portals and more than 1,000,000 digitized images from CSIC’s heritage collections. Digital.CSIC repository raises awareness and trains CSIC community on a broad range of OA issues (open standards and interoperability, copyright and author’s rights, advocacy and policymaking, dissemination efforts etc). With 40,000+ items, it is the largest and most widely visited open access repository of scientific resources in Spain.
Communication: Digital.CSIC Technical Office, Unit of Information Resources for Research (URICI) -Spanish National Research Council, C/Joaquín Costa 22; Office 308, 28002 MADRID, email: isabel.bernal[at]bib.csic.es
Revistas CSIC
Revistas-CSIC is a project developed since June 2007 by the CSIC Press Department; it aims to increase both visibility and usability of the scientific Journals published by the CSIC, thereby promoting their increased international diffusion and impact.
Revistas-CSIC provides free full-text access to the online edition of 37 CSIC Journals, most of them founded back in the 1910-1930’s and 1940-1950’s. Currently, 28 Journals provide immediate, free online access to its contents, and 9 Journals provide 6-months delayed access to full-text research articles.
Revistas-CSIC is continually updated with new content, publishing current issues of CSIC Journals and post-print papers in advance to the print edition. Back Issues are also added progressively to the online edition.
Revistas-CSIC has become a reference site for Journals in all areas of knowledge, with more than 13,0 million PDF normalized downloads (more than 17,0 million total downloads) since its appearance.
Some features of Revistas-CSIC:
- 37 peer-reviewed Journals, 34 of them indexed by Scopus® and/or ISI–Web of ScienceTM.
- More than 16,000 scientific papers and other documents available in open access.
- Multiple subjects: Science and Technology, Social Sciences, Arts and Humanities.
- Multiple languages: English, French, Spanish and others.
- All content distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non commercial Spain 3.0 License.
- Dublin Core metadata (DCMES) and interoperability (OAI-PMH).
- Long-term preservation and permanent access.
e-Revistas (Open Access Platform for Spanish and Latin-American Scientific Journals) provides access to summaries, metadata, and links to full-text content of more than 550 Journals, selected by the accomplishment of the Latindex criteria for scientific edition. Journals are organized by subject matter, and users have different tools for simple and advanced search.
Editors have the choice to upload metadata contents manually or automatically via OAI-PMH. Access is transparent for the user: full-text files are accessed at the jounal’s websites, so avoiding unnecessary duplications that may obscure the relevance of the journal itself.
e-Revistas is one of the most used Open Access platforms in Spanish language, with more than 2,5 million page views in the last 3 years.
RECOLECTA – Spanish Open Access Science Harvester Portal – was created in 2007, and currently indexes more than 722 422 scientific documents, 100 % open access. RECOLECTA project also intends to assure that the development of the Spanish Open Access infrastructure follows international standards, and so it has translated the DRIVER guidelines, DINI.
National and Institutional Level Policies/Mandates:
Ministry of Science and Innovation require all publicly funded research to be deposited as soon as possible after publication and within 6 months of publication. This is also now mandated through the new law on Science enacted in May 2011.
Comunidad of Madrid (CM) has an OA deposit requirement for researchers as soon as possible or within 12 months of publication for humanities and social sciences; within 6 months for biosciences and technologies.
Government of the Principality of Asturias has an OA deposit requirement as soon as possible or within 6 months of publication.
Details of Key Organizations:
Network of Academic and Research University Libraries of Spain (REBIUN)
Overview: Open Access and repositories are REBIUN strategic objectives. REBIUN has created, together with FECYT, the portal RECOLECTA; almost all universities have an institutional repository in place, and 10 universities have already established a self-archiving mandate:
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid; Universidad de Salamanca; Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena; Universidad Politécnica de Madrid; Universidad Rey Juan Carlos; Universitat de Barcelona; Universitat Oberta de Catalunya; Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya; Universitat Pompeu fabra.
Communication address: Plaza de las Cortes, 2-7 ª planta,28014 Madrid 28014 Madrid, Spain; e-mail: rebiun(at)crue.org
The Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT)
Overview: FECYT coordinates OA policies and projects in Spain. It runs RECOLECTA, the Spanish national project for the constitution of the federated infrastructure of open institutional repositories.
FECYT is the national desk for Spain in the OpenAIRE project, and was the coordinator of the seminar taken place in 2010 about Open Access in Southern Europe that gave place to the Alhambra Declaration (http://oaseminar.fecyt.es), comprising recommendations of OA experts to foster OA in the South of Europe.
Communication address: Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología, C/ Pedro Teixeira, 8 (planta 2), 28020 Madrid, Spain; e-mail: comunicacion(at)fecyt.es
Past and Future OA Related Activities:
Spain has held several influential conferences and seminars on Open Access. There have been a series of REBIUN Workshops at several universities of Spain.
The portal AccesoAbierto.net and the national distribution list Os-repositorios are main channels of OA dissemination and discussion.
List of Publications
- Abadel, E et.al (2010) Open access in Spain In Open access in Southern European countries. Madrid: FECYT: 101-115.
- Melero, R, Medina, A L and Prats, J (2008) Landscape of Open Access Institutional Repositories in Spain
- Melero R. (2006). Open access environment in Spain: How the “Movement” has evolved and current emerging initiatives. Workshop Open Access and Information Management, Oslo 10 May 2006.
- Melero R. (2007). Open access institutional repositories: the case study of Spain.


