Memorandum strengthens cooperation in sharing scientific knowledge
The Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and La Referencia - The Federated Network of Institutional Repositories of Scientific Publications in South and Central America signed on 16 September, in Porto during the Open Science Fair event, a Memorandum of Cooperation to strengthen cooperation in sharing scientific knowledge between Portugal and Latin American countries, namely Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay.
Since 2009, Portugal, through FCT, and Brazil, through the Brazilian Institute for Information in Science and Technology - IBICT, have been collaborating in the area of open access and, more recently, in Open Science. With this new Memorandum, cooperation also reaches other Latin American countries, with the RCAAP - Open Access Scientific Repositories of Portugal portal now aggregating content from the institutional repositories of the La Referencia network and vice versa. The development of specialized software is another of the objectives of this Memorandum, enabling increased innovation and reducing the development effort, thus obtaining more sustainable software.
The national open access initiative - the Open Access Scientific Repositories of Portugal (RCAAP) - was set up in 2008 and its mission is to promote, support and facilitate the adoption of open access to scientific knowledge in Portugal and to store, make available and preserve the scientific production that is transmitted to them. One of the services of the initiative is the RCAAP portal which aims to collect, aggregate and index the scientific content in open access (or free access) existing in the institutional repositories of national higher education entities and other R&D organisations. The RCAAP portal is a single point of search, discovery, location and access to thousands of scientific and academic documents, including journal articles, conference papers, theses and dissertations, distributed by numerous Portuguese repositories.
Written by: FCT Communication Office
Photo: Dr. Nuno Feixa Rodrigues, from FCT, and Bianca Amaro, President of LA Referencia, during the signing of the agreement.
Credit: LA Referencia
