RECERCAT (Dipòsit de la Recerca de Catalunya) is a cooperative repository in which users can consult research literature from universities and research centers, such as articles, research works, final projects, congress talks, reports, working papers, etc. Documents can be directly sent to RECERCAT or via the repositories of each institution. In this last case, RECERCAT acts as a collector by integrating and organizing the documents in a common space regardless of the repository in which they have been included.

RECERCAT is promoted by the universities of Catalonia and the Biblioteca de Catalunya, managed by the Consorci de Serveis Universitaris de Catalunya (CSUC), sponsored by the Generalitat de Catalunya and with the participation of other Catalan institutions.

Finalities and objectives

RECERCAT has the purpose of making the research carried out in Catalonia more visible. RECERCAT complies with the Article 37 of the Spanish Science, Technology and Innovation Act, which establishes that all funded researchers from the General State Budgets publish in open access, recommending this publication in repositories. RECERCAT also fulfills the OpenAIRE initiative of the European Commission in order to help the beneficiaries of grants to deposit their peer-reviewed research articles in open access repositories.

The purpose is specified in the following objectives:

• Increase the visibility of documents, authors and institutions, and all the research done in Catalonia.
• Facilitate open electronic edition via self-loading.
• Add value to documents via normalized citations, query statistics, permanent addresses and preservation mechanisms.

Documents and Copyright

The institutions themselves are responsible for disseminating the repository among their researchers and students so that they deliver the necessary information to enter the documents to RECERCAT or to the repositories of the institutions.

Documents included in RECERCAT are open access and immediately available in full text, although there may be a seizure of documents, temporary or restricted to institution members.

Documents are written with Dublin Core metadata following the OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative-Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) interoperability protocol. The use of the OAI-PMH protocol increases the consultation of documents and their visibility by offering them together with other repository documents, such as OpenAIRE (European portal of scientific documentation) or OAIster (an international collective catalogue with more than 50 millions of registries that represent the digital resources of more than 2,000 collaborators).

The conditions of use are specified in the registry of each document, in the “Rights” field. Mostly, documents are released being subject to Creative Commons licenses.

Access to documents

Documents are on free access, and users can search by full text, author, type of document, date of publication, language, topics, etc. Users have a recommended citation available for each document, which can be exported to Mendeley, as well as they can check statistics and share the document on social networks. RECERCAT offers the possibility to subscribe to the Alert Service of any of the collections it includes to receive by email or RSS the notification of recently introduced documents.

Preservation

Daily backups are periodically sent to the cooperative document warehouse GEPA, located in Lleida. Indeed, RECERCAT uses a file integrity monitor to avoid bit-level alterations in documents. For each document, there’s available a unique and permanent identifier based on the Handle system.

Software

Since its beginnings in 2005, RECERCAT works with the open-source program DSpace, created by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Hewlett Packard (HP). It currently works under DSpace 1.7.2.

How to participate?

If you are the author of a document elaborated in a RECERCAT's participating institution and you want to publish it to RECERCAT or request a modification to an existing document, please contact the corresponding institution or email recercat@csuc.cat.

SIf you want to include a published article to RECERCAT and you’re not sure of the copyright policy of the publisher and/or magazine, check the summary you’ll find on the international list SHERPA/RoMEO and the Spanish DULCINEA, containing the permissions that are normally given as part of the copyright transfer agreement to publishers. If neither the editor nor the magazine where you posted the article is listed, you should contact the editor directly.

RECERCAT is open to the collaboration of institutions and research centers in Catalonia that want to disseminate their scientific production. If you want to participate or would like to have more information concerning RECERCAT, please contact recercat@csuc.cat.