Abstract:

The importance of disseminating knowledge in open access platforms and the recent introduction of the concept of open science have gained importance in the two first decades of the 21st century. Open access knowledge and information repositories are the most obvious example of this trend which is gaining more and more favor in the context of scientific research and publication. Institutional scientific repositories are invaluable tools for communicating and disseminating knowledge. The main goal of this study was to evaluate the evolution of the Polytechnic Institute of Castelo Branco Scientific Repository (RCIPCB) from its foundation in 2010 to the end of 2023. As this work was a follow-up, a comparison was made with the data collected and published in previous studies with the same goal carried out in 2012 and 2014 on the RCIPCB. A survey was drawn up and distributed by email to 220 teachers/researchers (FTEs) from the six higher education schools of the Castelo Branco Polytechnic Institute (IPCB). The data collected was processed using the IBM SPSS statistical software. There were 38% of valid responses. The majority of respondents were: over 40 years old (67%; p<0.05), male (57%), knew about the RCIPCB (99%; p<0.05), knew the Open Access Movement (78.3%; p<0.05) but 20% of them didn’t use the RCIPCB. Of the 80% of respondents who use the RCIPCB, 33% (p<0.05) reported using it to consult and download documents, 23% to deposit documents and 1.5% to check their own scientific production. However, on a scale of 1 to 5 where 1 is "Not at all important" and 5 is "Essential", 48% (p<0.05) gave the RCIPCB a rating of 5 and 31% a rating of 4. The majority of respondents indicated the "Visibility of the institution" (53%; p<0.05) and the "Reputation of the institution as a producer of science" (48%) as results of the repository's impact. Regarding to the concepts of Open Access and Open Science, 82% (p<0.05) of respondents said that they were complementary concepts, revealing some relative knowledge about the two concepts. Although more than 10 years have passed since the beginning of the RCIPCB, the results obtained show that there is a need to continue making efforts to inform, train and motivate IPCB teachers/researchers about the advantages and benefits of open access to knowledge and, consequently, the advantages to deposit the documents they produce and publish in the open access repository. In addition, the results indicate a lack of information on institutional, national and supranational open access policies, which also shows the need for information to reduce the discrepancy between the scientific production of the institution's teachers/researchers and its availability in open access RCIPCB.

Keywords:

Scientific repository, open access, performance.