Improving the visibility of institutional repository, digital theses and research data: the case of the Peruvian University for Applied Sciences

Conferencia ETD2017, realizada en Washington DC, 7-9 de Agosto de 2017.In the last three years Peru has gone through changes in the process of strengthening and disseminating open access, especially regarding digital theses and research or governmental data. Enactment of Law 30035, which establishes and regulates the Open Access National Digital Repository of Science, Technology and Innovation; the Regulations of the National Registry of Research Papers Submitted for Academic Degrees and Professional Titles, RENATI; the National Strategy for Open Governmental Data, Peru 2017-2021; and the Peruvian Open Governmental Data Model constitute all a legal framework that fosters open access. Within this context, since 2013 the Peruvian University for Applied Science, UPC, has implemented policies aimed to foster open access to academic and scientific information, as well to support the use of interoperable technological platforms. As a result, in March of 2013, the UPC Academic Repository was published. And, recently, UPC adopted as mandatory the open access publication of bachelor’s and master’s theses. In the last three years, the UPC Academic Repository ranked among the top in the Webometrics Repositories (Peru), and showed a significant improvement at the Latin American and World level: At the national level, it went from being ranked 13th in January 2013 to 3rd in January 2017. Worldwide, it went from being ranked 1,516th in January 2013 to 849th in January 2017. In Latin America, in January 2017 it was ranked 62nd among 217 repositories. All actions implemented have been complemented with the following strategies: the open access publication of the theses-related data; the use of diverse metadata standards —Dublin Core Qualifiers, ETD-MS, DRIVER 2.0 and OpenAIRE—; the use of the OAI-PMH interoperable protocol; the implementation of identifiers of digital content —DOI and Handle— and identifiers for users —ORCID and Google Profile—; and curation of digital content. Future activities will be oriented to increase visibility of the UPC repository contents. To this end, we have proposed the following: to use DOI in bachelor’s and master’s theses; increase the number of bibliographical records for theses and their data; monitor and assess consultations to UPC theses as shown by national repositories ALICIA and RENATI; and, finally, implement an automated system for managing theses integrated into the UPC Academic Repository