Isabel BernalDigital.CSICCSIC Libraries Coordination UnitCSIC, Spanish National Research Council

Submitted, accepted and published by Elsevier, Serials Review 37 (1): 3-8 (2011)

Digital.CSIC: Making the Case for Open Access at CSIC

CSIC, An Important Player in the Scientific Development in Spain

The Spanish National Research Council (CSIC in Spanish, http://www.csic.es) was created in 1939 to

replace the Board for Advanced Studies and Scientific Research (JAE in Spanish) formed in 1907.

Nowadays, CSIC is the largest public institution dedicated to research, a huge organization consisting of

more than a hundred research centers and institutes distributed nation-wide and comprising a staff of more

than 15.5001, out of whom almost 9.6002 are directly devoted to research activities, including permanent,

hired researchers and fellows. Belonging to the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the

Secretary of State for Research, CSIC’s main objective is to develop and promote research that will help

bring about scientific and technological progress, and to collaborate with Spanish and foreign entities in

order to achieve that progress.

CSIC is mostly known by the excellence of its scientific production: 6% of all scientific community based in

Spain works at CSIC who altogether generates approximately 20% of scientific output in the country

yearly. It also manages important and modern facilities as well as the most complete and extensive

network of scientific libraries in the country. Over the last years a remarkable increase in joint research

units in partnership with universities and other scientific institutions across Spain has occurred.

CSIC multidisciplinary and multi-sectorial nature embodies scientific and technical research made in 8

broad areas: Humanities and Social Sciences; Biology and Biomedicine; Natural Resources; Agricultural

Sciences; Physical Science and Technologies; Materials Science and Technology; Food Science and

Technology; Chemical Science and Technology. Other CSIC principal functions are:

Advice to other scientific and technical bodies

Transfer of results to the business sector

Contribution to creation of technologically-based companies

Training of specialized staff

Management of infrastructures and large facilities

Promotion of a culture of Science

1 2008 figures, Plan de Actuación 2010-20132 2008 figures, Plan de Actuación 2010-2013

Scientific representation of Spain at the international level

By Royal Decree CSIC became a State Agency in 2007, thus getting an official recognition that backs its

history as a main player in fostering innovation and scientific innovation in the country. The Strategic Plan

for 2010-2013 gives a further impetus over previous structures with the immediate priorities being

dissemination, internationalization and the evaluation of CSIC scientific production. Within this framework,

increased efforts are being channelled in order to make CSIC science more widely available worldover. Its

institutional repository Digital.CSIC (http://digital.csic.es/) plays a crucial role in this endeavour.

Digital.CSIC: A Unifying Project in a Complex Organization

Digital.CSIC is a direct consequence of the signing by CSIC Presidency of the Berlin Declaration in 2006,

which marked the official commitment of the institution to disseminating its research via open access. Two

institutional projects resulted. First, the CSIC Press Department started Revistas CSIC

(http://revistas.csic.es/) in June 2007, a major publishing initiative which is migrating the full collection of

35 CSIC scientific journals into an open access model; next, CSIC Libraries Coordination Unit publicly

launched the institutional repository Digital.CSIC in January 2008 with the ambition to become the memory

archive of all CSIC scientific and technical production and provide open access. Today, both projects have

entered into a consolidation phase and have managed to establish stable infrastructures with a growing

agenda of cooperation internally and elsewhere.

Hence, Digital.CSIC was built to maximize the international visibility, accessibility and impact of CSIC

research by taking advantage of innovations in the field of information management and by participating

actively in the open access movement. In order to do so, Digital.CSIC has taken CSIC geographical

distribution across the country as an opportunity to grow an institutional project where all research centers

and institutes and the whole network of 78 libraries participate in the pursuit of a common goal. As far as

CSIC libraries involvement is concerned, the project has benefited to a large degree from the already

established culture of cooperation that began in 1990 when the Libraries Coordination Unit was created to

facilitate interlibrary loans, supervise libraries automation at an institutional level, maintain and develop a

centralised catalogue and oversee institutional licensing of electronic scholarly resources. Over the years,

this Unit has diversified its projects where CSIC libraries come together to share expertise, resources, and

mutual interests. Digital.CSIC is but another project that falls within this culture of cooperation and, on this

occasion, libraries also become central enablers within CSIC to widely disseminate the outputs produced

by scientists in the centers and institutes where they belong. Digital.CSIC places all these libraries at the

forefront in the strategy for scientific dissemination at CSIC.

The other fundamental pillar of the institutional repository is CSIC scientific community itself. Since the

beginnings of Digital.CSIC, it was clear that its long term sustainability depended greatly on the active

involvement of all CSIC centers and institutes, something that was not assumed, given the considerable

degree of autonomy, let alone their distribution, across all regions in Spain -and a few settlements abroad-

that characterize them. In fact, CSIC comprises 19 centers and institutes devoted to Humanities and

Social Sciences (http://www.csic.es/web/guest/humanidades-y-ciencias-sociales); 25 to Biology and

Biomedicine (http://www.csic.es/web/guest/biologia-y-biomedicina); 30 to Natural Resources

(http://www.csic.es/web/guest/recursos-naturales); 15 to Agricultural Sciences

(http://www.csic.es/web/guest/ciencias-agrarias); 28 to Physical Science and Technologies

(http://www.csic.es/web/guest/ciencia-y-tecnologias-fisicas); 13 devoted to Materials Science and

Technology (http://www.csic.es/web/guest/ciencia-y-tecnologia-de-materiales); 10 to Food Science and

Technology (http://www.csic.es/web/guest/ciencia-y-tecnologia-de-alimentos); and 15 to Chemical Science

and Technology (http://www.csic.es/web/guest/ciencia-y-tecnologias-quimicas). In addition to these

centers and institutes, CSIC has a few special infrastructures devoted to research, including Calar Alto

Astronomical Observatory (http://www.caha.es/), Doñana Biological Station

(http://www.ebd.csic.es/website1/Principal.aspx), Hespérides Ocean Research Vessel

(http://www.utm.csic.es/hesperides.asp?switchlang=2), Sarmiento de Gamboa Ocean Research Vessel

(http://www.utm.csic.es/sarmiento_his.asp?switchlang=2), Juan Carlos I Antarctic Base

(http://www.utm.csic.es/bae.asp), Microelectronics White Room (http://www.imb-cnm.csic.es/index.php?

option=com_content&view=article&id=25&Itemid=70&lang=en) and is one of the institutional members of

Max von Laue/Paul Langevin Institute (http://www.ill.eu/) and the European Synchroton Radiation Facility

(http://www.esrf.eu/). These represent quite a varied group of institutes, some with roots in the 1950s,

1940s and far back while others in their infancy. Each is dedicated to a richness of research areas and

topics and with diverging priorities, funding capabilities and human resources and equipment, however all

share a common interest in disseminating their research outputs. Therefore, buildling one repository that

would organize, preserve and facilitate access to all CSIC research was deemed the most productive

approach within a clear institutional context and affiliation. Important, too, was showing the connections

between centers and institutes, while at the same time providing enough space to show their identity and

develop their own collections of knowledge. The very consolidation of a project like this in such a complex

organization is a success in itself.

Last but not least, the third pillar of the repository is its Technical Office, a small team of librarians and IT

staff located at the CSIC Libraries Coordination Unit that designs its policies, its main development

strategy and work agenda, oversees the functioning of the platform, carries out technological innovations

and adds new services for end-users, trains CSIC researchers and librarians on how to use the repository,

raises awareness on open access in general and embarks on a number of dissemination and partnership

activities at national and international levels. This Technical Office also undertakes a huge part of the

deposits and is the only one with administrator’s permissions to work across all communities, sub-

communities and collections.

Content and Structure of Digital.CSIC

The CSIC scientific repository mirrors the institutional organization in 8 scientific and technical areas, to

which a 9th one, CSIC Central Services, has been added. Developed on DSpace software, the repository

just migrated from the 1.4.2 version into the 1.6.2 and staff now have the opportunity to make some layout

changes to the Web site for easier navigation and richer content discovery in resources and information for

end-users. Content growth is channelled through the coordination of the repository’s Technical Office, staff

from the network of CSIC librarians and a growing number of researchers who self-archive.

Digital.CSIC seeks not only to provide seamless and permanent access to current and future research

produced and/or financed by CSIC but also to make visible, organize, and preserve as much as possible

of CSIC science produced throughout its long history. In this enterprise, the repository is a useful platform

to accomplish this by guaranteeing permanent URLs alongside a stable infrastructure and clear agenda,

and- what is more important- the Presidency’s commitment to make this happen. Benefits derived from a

digital archive like this are enormous at all fronts (institutional, center, library or single researcher). In a

nutshell, to track what research the institution has made over the years is a very valuable tool for

conducting analysis of different kinds, be they to evaluate production and its degree of dissemination, to

study research patterns and most focussed and productive areas of interest, or to get an insight into the

very history of centers and institutes through their outputs, staff and achievements. For CSIC libraries, this

content adds value to the rich collections of scientific resources put at the disposal of end-users.

CSIC enjoys healthy publications habits. By way of illustration, Scopus indexes more than 85,000

publications by CSIC researchers. Turning into official numbers, one can get a more precise idea of the

potential for development for Digital.CSIC: in 2009 alone, CSIC research centres and institutes produced

9,741 SCI-SSCI-AHCI articles, 1,950 non SCI-SSCI.AHCI articles, 368 books, 1,784 books chapters, 104

other monographies, 4,634 proceedings and 3,409 posters in international conferences, 2,384

proceedings and 1,618 posters in national conferences, 793 PhD theses and 180 patents3. Between 2002

and 2007 CSIC researchers produced more than 60,0004 scientific outputs, disseminating material aside.

Trends in 2008 were similar, with a harvest of 8,754 SCI/SSCI articles, 1,762 non SCI/SSCI articles, 314

books and 672 PhD theses with a total of 19,7255 scholarly citations obtained. The challenge is to enrich

the digital repository not only with this all but with the huge volume of research from past decades that can

be yet of interest to scholars, as our usage statistics often show.

Digital.CSIC surpassed 26,000 items at the end of October 2010 and more than 82% of the content is

available in full text. At the outset of the project, the main stress was put on articles and conference papers

authored by CSIC researchers; progressively other types of research outputs have been incorporated, as

explained in our content policy (http://digital.csic.es/politicas/#politica1). To date, Digital.CSIC contains

articles and conference papers, theses and dissertations, book chapters/parts and books, patents,

software, reviews, posters, music compositions, datasets, photographs, videos and other multimedia

material. Likewise, there is room for the so-called grey literature, scientific output that is rather difficult to

find on the Web and worth of getting organized and exposed through the repository. At the request of

3 Data supplied by Office of CSIC Presidency4 Plan de Actuación 2010-20135 Plan de Actuación 2010-2013

researchers and libraries, the Technical Office considers the creation of new collections if none of the

existing ones can accommodate a specific sort of research.

Equally valuable, Digital.CSIC reflects the evolution of centers and institutes, while keeping content

organised based on clear criteria. Alongside sub-communities that correspond to existing institutes appear

others that house the research made by centers and institutes that no longer exists or have changed

names (http://digital.csic.es/community-list). Main languages are English and Spanish, and the United

States, Spain and United Kingdom stand as the 3 top user countries.

Main Typologies Number of items

Articles 19,331

Conference papers and proceedings 1,889

Books, chapters and/or extracts 1,240

Patents 1,014

Working papers 777

Theses and dissertations 453

Music compositions 279

Presentations 168

Posters 167

Divulgative and learning material 169

Technical Reports 91

Videos 21

Software 8

Maps 7

Datasets 4

Figures as of October 28, 2010

Statistics as of October 29, 2010

In June 2010 the staff revisited Digital.CSIC strategy for content development that can be divided into the

following action lines: focus on CSIC centers and institutes with the least presence in the repository;

launch of a campaign to promote new types of material, which includes the search and capture of the so-

called “hidden pearls”, works created in past decades but still highly valuable; expand marketing and

dissemination channels targeting CSIC researchers; provide reinforced assistance for those centers and

institutes without an individual library.

Content in Digital.CSIC by decades

0 500 1.000 1.500 2.000 2.500 3.0002010

2003

1996

1989

1982

1975

1968

1961

1949

Number of items

The software upgrade also falls within this content development strategy, and thus staff will start making

systematic use of SWORD to automate deposits from other platforms.

Nonetheless, all CSIC scientific and technical areas are already represented in Digital.CSIC and the gaps

amongst them are being closed at a steady pace. In this regard, it may appear striking that the highest

number of items corresponds to an area that is usually labelled as rather technofobic, that is, Humanities

and Social Sciences, an area encompassing 19 institutes. Indeed, the role played by the Tomás Navarro

Tomás Library (http://biblioteca.cchs.csic.es/), the one for all of those centers based in Madrid, is that of

encouraging researchers to self-archive. Undertaking a systematic upload of content on their behalf has

been instrumental to attain this result. Second to them stand Natural Resources, Physical Sciences, and

Agricultural Sciences, with little differences in the number of items. CSIC Central Services is a cross

sectorial community in the repository, created “ad hoc” in order to house material produced by “non-

scientific” bodies within CSIC, namely, the Press Department, the Office of Technology Transfer, the

Libraries Coordination Unit, the Vice-presidency of Organization and Scientific Culture and the Vice-

presidency of Scientific and Technical Research.

Scientific and technical areasNumber of

itemsAgrarian Sciences 3,771Biology and Biomedicine 1,895Chemical Sciences and Technologies 2,818CSIC Central Services 203Food Science and Technologies 813Humanities and Social Sciences 6,917Materials Science and Technologies 1,902Natural Resources 4,356Physical Sciences and Technologies 4,111

Figures as of October 28,2010

By getting a closer look at figures at center/institute level, it is possible for both the

Technical Office and individual institutes to keep track of growth pace on a monthly

and yearly basis.

Top 5 institutes at Digital.CSICNumber of

itemsInstitute of History (Madrid) 1,259

Aula Dei Experimental Station (Zaragoza) 1,100Institute of Marine Sciences (Barcelona) 977Institute of Natural Products and Agrobiology (Tenerife) 899Corpuscular Physics Institute (Valencia) 701

Figures as of October 28, 2010

In fact, in spring 2010 a set of locally developed statistics was released to enrich the existing usage

statistics. A number of CSIC libraries requested this service and felt that usage statistics would be very

useful to monitor their degree of participation in the repository, the trends in content growth in their

institutes, identify champion researchers and provide the scientific community with a system to measure

the impact of their research available through Digital.CSIC. As a result, this new module includes not only

usage statistics by country, month and year, but also general statistics that give an overview of total

figures, content typologies, most active self-archiving researchers and content distribution along

geographical and scientific areas criteria. The third component of this module generates center/institute

data, with information on the evolution of content by month and year, its classification by typologies, most

downloaded and visited items authored by researchers in the center/institute etc. An article explaining the

structure of the module was published in September (http://digital.csic.es/handle/10261/27913) and, as

this set intends to be a contribution to DSpace development, it is the plan to open the code in the near

future.

Most downloaded items within the collections of the Institute of Economic Analysis, as of October 29, 2010

Representation of all CSIC scientific areas in the institutional repository

Digital.CSIC rests on a hybrid work model whereby CSIC librarians and researchers may upload content

and through the so-called Delegated Archiving Service, authors can submit their works to their center’s

library to get them deposited on their behalf. The Technical Office has set clear policies on issues related

to the upload of content in the repository (http://digital.csic.es/politicas/) and promotes the wide

participation by conducting frequent training workshops for CSIC librarians and researchers and by

producing handbooks, manuals and useful resources that explain in plain language issues at stake when

filling out metadata fields (http://digital.csic.es/handle/10261/20101) and when checking copyright issues

(http://digital.csic.es/copyright/). At present, the annual average in deposit uploads is distributed as follows:

45% goes on the libraries network, 37% corresponds to the repository’s Technical Office and the

remaining 18% represents individual researchers.

Engagement with CSIC Researchers

Digital.CSIC is a tool for CSIC researchers. As such, all value added services, innovations and

improvements aim to meet their needs to facilitate enhanced dissemination and accessibility to their

research outputs. After some first commonplace skepticism, mostly derived from copyright concerns, lack

of knowledge about open access and repositories and a considerable degree of technophobia, reactions

which are not unknown to most institutional repositories, a growing number of CSIC researchers have

become familiar with the project. In this regard, the above mentioned set of statistics is highly valued and

utilized by researchers. As a success story in this respect, it is worth mentioning the case of 2 CSIC

researchers who, a few months ago, expressed their interest in uploading the massive “SPEIbase: a global

0.5º gridded SPEI data base” that shows the evolution of climate change in the world over the last century.

Since its availability through Digital.CSIC, its usage statistics continue to rise at a dramatic pace ( see

http://digital.csic.es/handle/10261/23139) and its authors report an incredible visibility and accessibility that

did not expect at all.

Since its beginnings, Digital.CSIC has made efforts to cultivate an open dialogue with CSIC scientific

community and make sure that their priorities and views are addressed. A major move along these lines

was the survey that the Technical Office conducted last spring 2010 to analyze how researchers value the

repository after almost 3 years of existence and to put it in context by learning more about their publication

habits and their attitudes towards open access to scholarly information. From a list of 6,879 names, 832

researchers responded to the survey. The primary findings have turned out to be very insightful: generally

speaking (a summary in English is available at http://digital.csic.es/handle/10261/28547), open access is

still relatively known amongst CSIC researchers and their publication trends follow mainstream behaviour,

with Elsevier, Springer and Wiley ranking high amongst publishers. The most cited open access benefits

are enhanced visibility and accessibility, and the ensuing impact on citations and professional careers, as

well as the ethical value of disseminating via open access research funded with public monies; however, a

minority is already making good use of many quality open access resources and initiatives. Scientists on

Physical Sciences, Biology and Biomedicine and related areas are most active and PLoS, Biomed Central,

PubMed Central, arXiv, SPIRES, NASA ADS and other platforms are not alien either for readers or

contributors. Within this framework, it is also noteworthy that some researchers reported to have paid open

access feed from their pockets -a remarkable and telling fact not to be neglected by a publicly funded

institution such as CSIC.

Answers from this survey have also helped greatly to verify whether the work agenda matches

suggestions by the respondents. A large part of the survey centered on the evaluation of Digital.CSIC:

33% of surveyed researchers claimed to use the institutional repository, with CSIC being the official Web

site or the very repository platform with the most frequent access points. Most within this group (62.9%)

regularly visit the repository to search and download works of interest while around half of them self-

archive their works –at a pace of around 5 works yearly–. To a large extent, answers in this section are

consistent with the primary findings concerning open access in general, namely, researchers who self-

archive or submit their works to their libraries or the Technical Office are primarily encouraged by the

prospect of gaining enhanced visibility and accessibility. They also do so to support the open access

movement and follow CSIC institutional recommendations.

The last free-text comments section of the survey indicated that more services and more contents are

desired improvements. Searching functionalities ranked very high, with many asking for advanced search

options, including links to other open access resources topically related and links to researchers’ CVs on

the results list. Almost 40% was also supportive of adding digitized material into the collections of the

repository whereas a huge majority proved very favourable that Digital.CSIC and other CSIC databases

containing information about scientific production could get integrated into one system. Other suggestions

for services included more training sessions and raising awareness over open access as well as

Digital.CSIC assistance with copyright issues.

From the outset, Digital.CSIC has been keen on incorporating add-ons and home-grown functionalities to

the platform to better serve its community of users. A number of functionalities have paved the way

towards gradual improvement of the repository, including the linking to CSIC Virtual Library through the

SFX resolver whenever an item under restricted access is accessible through CSIC licensed material; a

tool for showing news in the repository’s homepage; the so-called Auto-complete functionality which

makes easier and quicker the insertion of some metadata when depositing items, and “Digital.CSIC on

your web” API, which enables searches of Digital.CSIC content from external Web sites. A new wave of

add-ons will follow shortly, based on the Technical Office agenda and also to accommodate suggestions

by the surveyed.

The Way Forward

Digital.CSIC has recently embarked upon a dissemination campaign that intends to make the institutional

repository and the open access movement more widely known within the institution. The redesigning of the

platform’s Web site by making room for spaces dedicated to open access issues for researchers and

librarians, the preparation of promotional brochures (http://digital.csic.es/handle/10261/28538), comics

(https://digital.csic.es/handle/10261/28333) and a number of studies underway are working lines that all go

after the same goal. Another recent initiative is a bulletin CSIC Abierto (http://digital.csic.es/revista-csic-

abierto/?locale=en), issued every 3 months. It highlights research at CSIC centers and institutes and how it

gets freely available through the institutional repository. We have just published the second issue

(http://digital.csic.es/handle/10261/28605), coinciding with the celebration of the Open Access Week 2010,

which features our champion researcher, scientist and veterinarian Angel Mantecón, with 422 works –all

his scientific CV- and the work done from the institute’s library and Direction of his center, -the

Experimental Agrarian Station- to enable open access to knowledge.

A next major enterprise will be the building of an integrated information system: nowadays, CSIC has 3

major databases with detailed information about the research made by its community of scientists and

scholars. This undertaking is not free of technical, organizational and information management challenges;

however, the outcome will be the development of an unified, and therefore ergonomically and

economically efficient, system from which it will be possible to evaluate the scientific production by CSIC,

analyze it from different perspectives and implement the priority of ongoing CSIC Action Plan: that of

measuring the impact of its own scientific production. In order to do so, the institutional platform which

accumulates current information on scientific publications across all centers and institutes to be evaluated

yearly will open to applications of main bibliographic databases that will allow for the systematic capture of

thousands of metadata records, something that will avoid the manual data entry that has been the rule up

to now. Through the integration of these platforms, Digital.CSIC will benefit too greatly as efforts that are

now being concentrated solely on metadata creation can be channeled to the development of new

services for end-users. Further, through this project Digital.CSIC -and open access- will be placed at the

core of CSIC plan dealing with the evaluation of its scientific production. The design of this ambitious

project is closely linked to 2 nation-wide projects that are being currently developed under the umbrella of

the Spanish Foundation of Science and Technology and in which CSIC takes part: on the one hand, the

development of a standardized scientific CV (https://cv.normalizado.org/index.jsp) and on the other hand

the building of a persistent author identifier for Spanish scholars and researchers that will comply with

international standards.