Presentació a càrrec de Lluís Anglada, director de Ciència Oberta al CSUC sobre les influències i motivacions inicials per a la creació del repositori RACO, així com les seves característiques principal i funcionament.

2. Benvingut!
Lluís Anglada
RACO
Catalonia

3. What & How many
 Scholarly journals (broadly defined)
• Journals have to be published by
– Cultural associations, foundations, museums, professional associations, public
institutions, scientific societies, universities
• We accept non peer review journals / Newsletters and magazines are not
accepted
– 275 journals have a Spanish o Catalan quality seal
 Journals published in Catalonia
• and also journals in Catalan or about Catalan matters from Valencia, Balearic
Islands, and North Catalonia
 Figures
• 558 journals from 110 institutions
– 475 current / 83 discontinued
– 11 in JCR / 115 in DOAJ
– 249.926 articles / 99% in Open Access
– Some journals have embargoed the last issue

4. When & Why
 When
• 1991: electronic TOCS database
• 2001: we added full text articles to the database
• 2004: RACO was born as portal for OA journals
• 2006: RACO was reframed using OJS
• …
• 2019: migration to OJS v 3.1
 Why
• There is a lot of culture and science outside WoS
o SCOPUS
• Even if a journal is only in print, articles were born
digital
• CBUC (Consortium of Academic Libraries of
Catalonia) had the vision that the libraries’ mission
in the digital world was to help adding scholarly
information on the web

5. Local publishing culture
Present
• A lot of scientific / public / cultural institutions publish only one journal
– In some cases (universities) journals have the support of central services.
Even in this case journals use to be very autonomous
• Generally speaking
– Publishing institutions still have print journals as the model of reference +
Readers expect print copies
• In a lot of cases a journal is the unique tangible service that an association o
society gives to the members
– An they are afraid if OA reduces membership
Future
• The future will be digital and open.
– If you want to disseminate content will have to afford the cost/effort of doing it
electronic + Open
• You will have to be global if you want to continue being local
– Future journals (even ‘local’ ones) will need a solid infrastructure that helps them to
be in the EOSC (in the global)

6. Services & Sustainability
 RACO Services & Benefits
• Allowing journals to be at the web (a lot of journals alone couldn’t)
• Act as a portal or aggregator for searching articles of subjects not well covered
by other databases
• Being a quality seal for some cultural o scholarly journals
• Attract visits thanks to its force of gravity (size)
 Funding (the cost in 2020 was 87.069,72€)
• Catalan government and universities maintain cooperative
repositories as part of their mission
– Sadly nor Cultural neither Education departments of Catalan government
subsidized RACO
• Service fees
– To be at RACO is free (530 journals)
– RACO provides DOI + altmetrics + preservation = 300€ / year (11
journals)
– To use RACO to publish the journal = 1.200€ / year (18 journals)

7. How & Who
 How it Works
• The publisher / institution loads the articles in RACO and takes care of the
information about the journal
• An editorial board takes decisions about the inclusion (o not) of a Journal in
RACO
• Centrally CSUC maintain the portal and takes care of the metadata
exportation using OAI-PMH
 For Who
• For researchers
• For public institutions (publishers)
• For general public
• For Catalan culture