The Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia has put into force as of May 5, 2014, the Open Access Policy, which requires that scientific publications and data and other results of scientific research, resulting from funding allocated by FCT, through R&D projects, grants and scientific contracts must be deposited in open access repositories.
For scientific publications, FCT determines that "all publications of research outputs, subject to peer-review or another form of scientific review, should be deposited in one of the open access repositories hosted within RCAAP". Regarding the data, FCT "encourages researchers to share primary data and other data with the scientific community, by placing the data in open access databases".
GBIF is an eligible repository for open access publishing biodiversity data. In addition to meeting the requirements of the FCT Open Access Policy, the publication of data through GBIF ensures that they are interoperable (through adoption of data standards and metadata), maximizing the possibility of being discovered and reused by the rest of the scientific community. The new data papers journal Scientific Data (http://www.nature.com/scientificdata), from the editorial group Nature, selected GBIF as a preferred repository for deposit in open access to biodiversity data.
The publication of data through GBIF, fulfilling all the requirements of FCT's Open Access Policy, can be accomplished by the service Integrated Publishing Toolkit (http://ipt.gbif.pt) hosted by the Portuguese Node of GBIF. The IPT tool is provided by GBIF for publishing data and metadata and can also be installed by the institutions in their own server. Data and metadata published through this platform are indexed by the international GBIF data portal almost instantaneously, thus being accessible and searchable by the global user community.
For more information, see Open Access Policy of FCT or send us an email to info@gbif.pt.