Digital CONICET

Our Digital Institutional Repository was created on the 1st. August 2015 and was designed and developed by the Agency’s Organization and Systems Management. Its objective is to comply with Law 26,899and maximize the visibility of CONICET’s scientific production and obtain quality indicators.

For the creation of the IR Digital CONICET, an Advisory Committee made up of representatives of all the areas of the organization involved was established and  its main function has been to determine criteria and regulations for the definition of policies.

Over time, the members of the Advisory Committee continue to support, collaborate and create value for RI CONICET Digital.

Based on this, in 2015 the Resolution 2705/15 established the Policies of the CONICET Digital Institutional Repository regarding the deposit, contents, edition, metadata, use licenses, copyright, access and exclusion of CONICET Digital.

Since May 2015, the CONICET Digital Repository has been collected by the National System of Digital Repositories(SNRD in Spanish) under the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation of the Nation of that year, and this in turn by La Referencia(Regional System of Repositories that brings together 9 Latin American countries). Since January 2017, the latter is collected by OpenAire (Open Access Infrastructure for research in Europe funded by the European Commission within the framework of the Horizon 2020 program) allowing access to the scientific-technological production of CONICET on the platform of retrieval, storage and dissemination of science in Europe.

In December 2016, with the regulation of Law 26,899 through the Resolution 753/16 [3], the compliance deadlines were established, as well as the procedures corresponding to the application of the sanction for non-compliance with the obligations arising from that law and its exceptions.

For the Council, the repository is a way to bring together all its scientific production in a single environment, since it allows:

To collect and preserve the results of publicly funded research activities.

To reinforce the exploitation of the published results which, in turn, increase international cooperation.

To disseminate the activity of its researchers and fellows.

To get more accurate and complete production indicators

For the authors-researchers, the repository increases the  visibility of their publications and offers them:

Greater diffusion, impact and citation.

Integration in knowledge and collaboration networks.

Long-term preservation and persistent localization.

Statistics of use of your publications and social impact.

Localization of production through fast and effective indexing in web search engines, academic bases, aggregators and harvesters.

For society, the repository is an environment for permanent consultation on advances in knowledge, offering:

Immediate, transparent and free access to scientific and technological production.

Simplification of searches and more efficient location of research results.

Return on investment in the form of research results.

Elimination of economic barriers to access to scientific information.

Scope of a greater social perception by science.

Digital CONICET has a decentralized structure for the processing of its scientific and technological production.

It has a Central Technical Office from where the material is distributed throughout the country to be processed and from where a quality control is carried out before depositing it on the repository’s website.

The repository has a Federal Network of Specialists distributed in different CONICET dependencies throughout the country that are in charge of processing the production published by the researchers of the Implementation Units to which they belong or in other cases are in charge of processing all production published in a particular region of the country.

Central Technical Office

In order to coordinate, process and provide access to CONICET’s scientific, technological production and research data, the Technical Office (OT in Spanish) was created, which works in the Council’s Organization and Systems Management.

The OT team is made up of information professionals who daily review and analyze the results published by the researchers to deposit them in a standardized manner and in Open Access in the RI CONICET Digital.

Due to the volume of documents to be processed, a Federal Network of RI Specialists was created to support the TO. In this way, the OT supervises a Federal Network of RI CONICET Digital Specialists that in a decentralized manner curates or processes the records self-archived by CONICET researchers in the SIGEVA Data Bank.

Federal Network of RI Specialists

Since the creation of the RI, face-to-face and virtual training has been carried out, voluntarily calling information professionals and other profiles from the different CONICET agencies throughout the country to specialize in the curatorship process.

Thus, a Federal Network of RI Digital CONICET Specialists was formed, which gradually process the works resulting from the scientific activities of CONICET researchers.

Management by results

The work modality established in the Central Technical Office is based on management by results, projecting goals over time based on installed capacity.

As a first objective, it was established that by 2016 the Repository would have 10,000 articles deposited and made available to society. Objective that has been met with an effort of 80% of the OT and 20% of the Network.

The second objective set for 2017 had been to reach 30,000 articles available in the IR, a goal that was also achieved with the same percentage of effort.

Then, it was established that for the first semester of 2018, a total of 50,000 articles deposited in the IR would be achieved, a goal reached on June 30, 2018 with the same percentage of effort.

A fourth objective was set for the beginning of 2020, where a total of 100,000 articles published in the RI were obtained. Year in which both the OT and the Federal Network of Curators exceeded their effort index.

In the year 2022, the Data Repository for the preservation of data resulting from scientific activities was implemented.

During the first quarter of 2023 the most important milestone of the RI was achieved: completing the collection of Articles published between 2013 and 2021.

The projection for following years is related to the incorporation of the rest of the productions corresponding to the publications of scientific events, doctoral theses, books, book chapters and research data.

At a technical level, an Institutional Repository Administration Module (MARI in Spanish) was developed. It allows communication between SIGEVA and the DSpace platform, administrating and processing the production that will finally be deposited in Open Access in the RI CONICET Digital .

The open source DSpace platform has been reconfigured to adapt to communication with SIGEVA through MARI.

Both the technical and organizational development of the RI Digital CONICET has collected, in a short time, more than 60,000  Open Access records and increased the visibility and consultation of the scientific results published by the researchers of the organization.

This implementation has been thought from its origin to be able to be transferred and adopted by other institutions that have SIGEVA and need to implement an Institutional Repository.

CONICET Digital contains scientific and technological production self-archived by CONICET researchers, scholars and scholars in the Integral Evaluation System (SIGEVA).

The publications in Digital CONICET  are organized both by areas of knowledge and disciplines, as well as by communities/subcommunities and types of collections.

The Communities and Sub-communities  comprise CONICET Institutional Network: Scientific and Technological Centers (CCT), their Implementation Units and Associated Units.

The process of including productions in the  Digital CONICET Institutional Repository comprises several stages that allow improving the descriptive quality of each digital object. A good descriptive quality generates a correct organization and increases the precision to obtain better results in the recovery of the productions.

The publication cycle in Digital CONICET  consists of the following stages:

Self-archiving: the person(s) author(s) archive their production in SIGEVA in the same way that they have been doing since 2005.

Compilation: from SIGEVA different tasks are carried out automatically to detect inconsistencies, recognize similar records and prepare batches of records that will go on to the next stage.

Unification: the compiled records are reviewed, similar ones are compared and unified in a new record, selecting the best constructed metadata from each record.

Curatorship: from the CONICET Digital administration platform, a new control is made over the metadata; In this instance, the specialist has the ability to edit each metadata with a controlled vocabulary.

Inclusion in CONICET Digital: the records are made publicly available.

• 80% of the articles available in the   Digital CONICET RI were published in the last 5 years.
• The scientific-technological production deposited in the  Digital CONICET RI is made up of 75% of documents available in Open Access.
• The articles available in the  Digital  CONICET RI cover all disciplines and topics of interest. It is possible to find material on renewable energies, climate change, bioplastics, gender, social inclusion, dinosaurs, industry, food security, exotic species, new technologies, among others.
• One of the services provided by Digital CONICET is to provide users who require access to the article that is restricted or embargoed by editorial policies. This is done with the prior approval of the author (researcher).
• The authors of CONICET are highlighted with the organization’s logo.
• Digital CONICET RI aggregators: Google Scholar, BASE, CORE, OpenAire, WorldWideScience, SNRD Portal, La Referencia.
• The  Digital CONICET RI receives more than one million visits per month.
• Check the statistics on visits and progression of titles published in  CONICET Digital RI since its inception here.

With the aim of advancing in compliance with Law 26,899/13 “Open access institutional digital repositories”, the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) -through the Organization and Systems Management- implemented a platform to preserve research data collected or produced in any scientific activity by the CONICET Community.

This implementation has multiple benefits for researchers, fellows, and support staff. On the one hand, it makes it possible to centralize and link, where applicable, research data sets with scientific-technological production and, on the other, it facilitates their recovery so that they can be reused. In addition, they are stored and protected in a single place, being able to create a profile of their scientific production and research data where they can be referred to through a single access. Also, for each data set, a persistent identifier (handle) is obtained, which is the link that can be used both to share access and to make bibliographic citations.

The platform comprises the Data Bank of the Comprehensive Management and Evaluation System (SIGEVA) and the deposit flow of the CONICET Digital Institutional Repository.