19th International CODATA Conference
Category: Poster, Open Communication

Design and implementation of a platform  for electronic journals OAI-PMH compliant. An approach to Spanish e-journals

Reme Melero (rmelero@iata.csic.es), Editor of Food Science and Technology International. IATA, CSIC, Spain
Jose Ramón Pérez-Agüera (jose.aguera@ccinf.ucm.es), Dpt. Biblioteconomia y Documentación, Facultad de Ciencias de la Información, Universidad Complutense de  Madrid, Spain


Removing access barriers to scientific  literature accelerates research, enriches education and shares knowledge among different communities. This kind of free and unrestricted online availability, called ‘open access’ is limited  to small portions of the journal literature. In addition, the Open Archive Initiative (OAI) develops and promotes a low-barrier interoperability framework and associated  standards to enhance access to web material with the aim to facilitate dissemination of content. Moreover,  the possibility of accessing multiple repositories enables the construction of new kinds of services that can better serve the needs of the users. Based on these statements there has been created  a platform of Spanish scientific journals published electronically which includes a directory of free or open access Spanish journals and the tools for searching and browsing within them. The main aims of this project are the dissemination of knowledge, the increase of the quality and visibility of the publications  and favouring the access to the Spanish scientific production. The journals included in the directory  are selected according to quality criteria based on the items defined for Latindex Catalog (www.latindex.org).  To date, there about 40 scientific journals from different subjects which have agreed to participate in the project. The platform of Spanish e-journals supports a Service Provider based on the open source software ARC, developed by de Old Dominion University. The platform will implement a distributed architecture for  metadata harvesting OAI-PMH compliant. The OAI-Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) defines a mechanism for harvesting records containing metadata from repositories. A Service Provider issues OAI-PMH requests to Data Providers and uses the metadata. The metadata of published papers will be either harvested from the Data Providers or from a centralised Data Provider where the editors upload metadata when their  journals have not implemented the infrastructure of a Data Provider yet. In addition to the service provider  it has been created a portal which will provide the access to the journals  and resources relevant to electronic publishing.  The portal of e-journals   is hosted in a higher  Institutional  portal named Tecnociencia (www.tecnociencia.es) funded by the former Ministry of Science and Technology. Another functionality hosted by the portal are the categorisation of the journals and indexation of the metadata related to the content of papers.