Mission

The Digital Repository of the Scientific Institutes - RCIN was established in 2010 as a bottom-up initiative of the Institutes.

RCIN's mission is digitization and maximum dissemination, as well as providing permanent access and long-term digital archiving of scientific resources, in particular literature, scientific objects and data, both from the collections of the Partner Libraries and being the results of research and applied works conducted in the Institutes comprising the RCIN.

The adopted Meta-data structure based on Dublin Core and Darwin Core formats and API allow other entities operating on the digital market to index RCIN resources. Each of the provided objects is also supported by information about the license under which it was made available and terms of its use. Therefore, with the widespread use of Creative Commons free licenses, the RCIN platform contributes to a process known as opening up scientific resources for re-use. In RCIN we make available both old items (books, journals, maps) already classified under the so-called Public Domain, as well as currently published scientific journals or books and large collections of research data (including humanities, social, natural and medical sciences). Part of these resources, due to copyright protection, is not yet available in open access. These are gradually being opened up as their copyright period expires or the required licenses are obtained.

The data deposited in the Repository are managed by their custodians or authors from the Institute that hosts the resource. In the case of objects from the library collections of the Partners Institutes, they decide, depending on the type of licensing statement obtained, how to make the item available, e.g. initially restricting user access to the library terminals and after obtaining the required license or transferring the item to the public domain, making the item available under Open Access (OA) terms. In the case of scientific resources, the partners, being aware, for instance, that some shared data on endangered species may be sensitive data, have agreed to leave the assessment of the degree of sensitivity and the extent of information that can be made public to the custodians of individual collections, with the priority remaining on providing as much biodiversity information as possible. In justified cases, where it is considered that releasing the full information may cause harm to the species or the environment in which it occurs, the data are restricted according to the degree of harm. Georeferencing, for example, is currently added mainly for maps in the public domain, mill collections, or selected archaeological data, and often at a very close approximation. Medical records, on the other hand, are anonymized in such a way that patient data cannot be identified.

In rare cases where self-depositing procedures are in place, the owner of the deposited resource grants a license to a specific RCIN Partner and only after verification of the data does the deposited resource become available to the public.

Gathered materials are catalogued and digitized in a way enabling real-time access to them via the RCIN platform (files are optimized for the Internet). At the same time their digital copies (master files) are archived within the Polish IT infrastructure for science in the National Data Repository by means of dArceo archiving system. This is being carried out under control of dLab system, while the RCIN database itself is maintained under dLibra system, integrated with the other two - https://dingo.psnc.pl.

RCIN resources can be searched both via dedicated web page as well as Google, Google Scholar or WorldCat catalog - https://www.worldcat.org/. Also in the nationwide catalog of scientific libraries NUKAT http://katalog.nukat.edu.pllinks placed in bibliographic descriptions refer to the full texts of numerous positions published at the RCIN.

The repository is also being used as a publishing platform by some of the Institutes that comprise RCIN. In case of journals which are indexed in the most popular commercial databases such as Elsevier's SCOPUS or Web of Science, these databases link users to the full texts of articles published at the RCIN as a portal of the respective publisher. Other databases, such as: National Digital Library Federation and its intermediary Europeana, BASE being developed at German University of Belefield - https://www.base-search.net/, OMNIA or the most important Chinese scientific resources aggregator, Polish BazEkon, and many others, also gather resources from RCIN for their users. The solutions introduced in RCIN database support these activities.

The database is registered in the Open Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR), thus the articles stored therein, provided with unique static identifiers e.g. DOI, published under free license without time embargo, meet the requirements of the Regulation No 38/2020 of the Director of the National Science Centre on establishing the POLICY OF THE NATIONAL CENTRE FOR SCIENCE ON OPEN ACCESS TO PUBLICATION of 27-05-2020.

The RCIN has already received funding from the European Union two times - https://rcin.org.pl/dlibra/text?id=Projekty. These funds, on the one hand, have enabled its development, on the other hand they also support the expansion and sustainability of our platform. Currently RCIN has millions of users worldwide. We are pleased to be part of this large-scale undertaking.