How to find other scientific information

Another type of specialised, scientific information is unpublished digital documentation generated by the academic, professional and research worlds. This type of information is used to announce the findings of a given study to colleagues in the field. It is therefore an extremely valuable primary source for investigators in a given area that encourages the dissemination of and access to research results.

This group of resources includes: draft publications (preprints, or papers that have not been peer-reviewed, and postprints, or papers that have); technical and research reports; presentations and talks at conferences; technical standards; working papers; teaching materials; book chapters; and any other form of scientific publication in digital format that can be accessed online, often in full.

This type of scientific information is an alternative means of scientific publication and communication, based on international open-access initiatives. To find it, open-access repositories are used, i.e. digital archives created and maintained to facilitate free universal access to scientific information in digital format in order to promote research and scholarship.

Thus, the following institutional and research repositories are particularly useful for searching for scientific information:

NATIONAL

1) O2 ("The Oberta in Open Access") institutional repository

Allows users to view the open-access digital publications on research, teaching and administration produced by the UOC. It includes articles, papers, teaching materials, final degree projects, doctoral theses, etc. for the purpose of collecting, preserving and organising the UOC's scientific output and its annual report and, in particular, disseminating it, thus making it more visible and increasing its impact.

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2) RECERCAT (Catalan research repository): A cooperative repository of digital documents from universities and other research centres in Catalonia, including the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. This repository includes and offers access to specialised information and unpublished research. Its purpose is to raise the profile of research conducted in Catalonia, whilst at the same time contributing to the global movement to make academic and research work available online and free of charge. The project is coordinated by the Consortium of Catalan University Libraries and by the Supercomputing Centre of Catalonia and is sponsored by the Catalan government.

2) RACO (Catalan Journals in Open Access): A cooperative repository that can be used to gain open full-text access to Catalan scientific, cultural and scholarly journals. Full-text access to the articles in the repository is free; however, reproductions, distribution, public dissemination or the total or partial transformation thereof is subject to the terms and conditions of each journal and may require the express written consent of the authors and/or publishing institutions.

3) RECOLECTA: A portal offering research papers written at different Spanish academic institutions. It is an extremely useful tool for the university community and, in particular, for faculty and research staff. The information it contains is organised into categories and can be accessed, openly, by means of a search engine. The project is financed by the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECyT).

AT THE INTERNATIONAL LEVEL

1) Driver: A European project consisting of a portal for open-access research results. It is a service-oriented site that gathers qualitative data from different repositories. It then provides open access to the full text of the files.

2) OAISTER: A union catalogue with millions of records, housed at the University of Michigan since 2002. It consists of digital records from open-archive collections worldwide that were harvested using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). The wide range of available resources includes research papers and theses. It allows you to search by subject and includes a variety of filter options to facilitate retrieval.

There are also other helpful resources for finding more specific repositories, namely, repository directories. These tools allow you to search within a set of repositories and find specific ones for a given subject, field of study or country. A good example is PubMed Central (PMC), a project developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Library of Medicine in the US, designed to provide open access to biomedical and life sciences journal literature. Other excellent repository directories include:

1) OpenDOAR: An authoritative directory of academic open-access repositories. In addition to providing a list of available repositories, it allows you to search for repositories and to search their contents. The project is backed by the Open Society Institute (OSI), along with the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), the Consortium of Research Libraries (CURL) and SPARCEurope.

2) ROAR: This is a registry of open-access repositories. It aims to promote the development of open access by providing timely information about the growth and status of repositories around the world. It offers open access to research, thereby maximising the impact thereof with a view to making research more productive and effective.

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