Isabel Bernal
Digital.CSIC
CSIC Libraries Coordination Unit
CSIC, 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, 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 15.500[1], out of whom almost 9.600[2] 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
- 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 structureswith 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 ( 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 ( 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 ( 25 to Biology and Biomedicine ( 30 to Natural Resources ( 15 to Agricultural Sciences ( 28 to Physical Science and Technologies ( 13 devoted to Materials Science and Technology ( 10 to Food Science and Technology ( and 15 to Chemical Science and Technology ( In addition to these centers and institutes, CSIC has a few special infrastructures devoted to research, including Calar Alto Astronomical Observatory ( Doñana Biological Station ( Hespérides Ocean Research Vessel ( Sarmiento de Gamboa Ocean Research Vessel ( Juan Carlos I Antarctic Base ( Microelectronics White Room ( and is one of the institutional members of Max von Laue/Paul Langevin Institute ( and the European Synchroton Radiation Facility ( 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 patents[3]. Between 2002 and 2007 CSIC researchers produced more than 60,000[4] 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 19,725[5] 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 ( 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 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 ( 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 itemsArticles / 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.
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 ( 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 areas / Number of itemsAgrarian Sciences / 3,771
Biology and Biomedicine / 1,895
Chemical Sciences and Technologies / 2,818
CSIC Central Services / 203
Food Science and Technologies / 813
Humanities and Social Sciences / 6,917
Materials Science and Technologies / 1,902
Natural Resources / 4,356
Physical 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.CSIC / Number of itemsInstitute of History (Madrid) / 1,259
Aula Dei Experimental Station (Zaragoza) / 1,100
Institute of Marine Sciences (Barcelona) / 977
Institute of Natural Products and Agrobiology (Tenerife) / 899
Corpuscular 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 ( 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 wherebyCSIC 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 ( 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 ( and when checking copyright issues ( 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 and its authors report an incredible visibility and accessibility that did not expect at all.