About the Portal de la Recerca de Catalunya

The importance of open access and publicly display the research outputs produced in a university, research centres or country made that the General Directotate of Research of the Secretariat for Universities and Research from Generalitat de Catalunya decided to launch the Portal de la Recerca de Catalunya. The coordination of the project is assumed by CSUC together with a working comission of catalan university and research centres members experts. Its first steps started at the end of 2012, and it's opened to the public in 2016 after a restricted access period.

The portal's goal is to display and disseminate from a single place the research activity that is carried out in Catalonia in regard to researchers, groups and research projects, publications, theses and datasets for the international scientific community, companies, financial organizations and public in general, thus making open access to scientific output easy. In the long term, the project aims at simplifying management processes as well as to support their evaluation.

The benefits of PRC are:

  • For the Catalan system: give light to the potential of the system as a whole.
  • For universities and research centres: strengthen unified management processes of research data.
  • For researchers: increase the access and visibility of their work.

The Portal is based on the premise of taking advantage of the work that universities and research centres have done on their current research information system (CRIS) and it is intended that the works for the PRC improve the information management in each institution. This is done by jointly deciding agreements of data availability, capturing information through standard formats (CERIF) and interoperability protocols, using common identifiers to avoid ambiguities (for example ORCID for researchers), and promoting open access to scientific production and the use of institutional repositories.

When we drew the first sketches of the PRC, the only European reference for a similar project was in The Netherlands with NARCIS, which has now been replaced by the Netherlands Research Portal, created in collaboration with OpenAIRE, UKB i SURF. At local level the Portal follows the example and good practices of FUTUR. Website for the scientific production of UPC researchers and UPF scientific output. In recent years, however, several data integration projects have been launched in Europe in the field of research and innovation. Some of the most distinguished projects are:

Further information at: