Last Thursday (11/11) was the day to celebrate 20 years since the creation of the Journal Portal of the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (Capes). The opportunity to recall the steps taken in the two decades of the journey and to see new paths for the future of the virtual library was the IV Journal Portal Seminar. The online event, broadcast on CAPES channel on YouTube, had special participation in the program. Among them, Nelson Simões, general director of the National Education and Research Network (RNP).

Benedito Aguiar, president of Capes, inaugurated the pulpit, who defended the importance of the Portal for the Brazilian scientific research. “Twenty years ago, the creation of this portal had high impact on the scientific community, meeting very high expectation for the Brazilian science in terms of scientific support base for research in our country. Today, we celebrate its consolidation and its importance. It is the largest research support base in our country. This is a reason to proud for Capes!”, Benedito vibrates.

“You cannot make scientific research without knowing the history of what has already been done”.

Benedito Aguiar, president of Capes

The professor also thanked the professionals, the teams and the institutions that contributed to the success of the tool in the last years. Among them, RNP: “We thank RNP for the technical support for Journal Portal to serve our scientific community in the best possible way”.

When it was time to take over the microphones, Nelson Simões said words of praise. “RNP is very proud to be a partner of Capes in this journey. This year, technology had to assume a stronger mediation role in the education and research activities. And 20 years ago, Capes was already taking this step to contribute to share knowledge as a public asset for research and education in Brazil ”.

Nelson was invited to speak about the topic Technology and Communications for Education in Brazil after Covid. The General Director shared the perceptions of RNP about the changes brought in the pandemic, such as the strengths and the weaknesses noted in the RNP System, the challenges to be overcome, and the projects as solutions to these problems, the factors that should drive ICTs in education in the coming years and possible future paths.

The 20 years of trajectory

Capes Journal Portal is the biggest virtual collection and the biggest research support base in the country. In the world, there is no other initiative like this: a wealth of information funded by the government and made available to thousands of researchers from hundreds of institutions. The Portal is also the initiative of its kind with the highest capillarity on the planet, covering the entire Brazilian territory. The virtual library promotes the strengthening of the national graduate programs, by means of the democratization of the on-line access to high-level international scientific information and boosts the scientific production in the country, in addition to the growth of the Brazilian scientific insertion abroad.

“For us to be able to offer all this content to our community, there is a very big infrastructure behind. We have ICT infrastructure hosted at RNP IDC, which guarantees us high availability, economy and security, in addition to '24x7' monitoring to assure that our researchers, anywhere in the world, can access the Journal Portal,” Andrea Vieira, portal coordinator, explained.

Other technologies used in the Portal come from the partnership with RNP: integrated solutions, such as an optimized search engine, transparent use in participating institutions (proxy) and access through CAFe (Federated Academic Community); Capes digital content repository; collection and monitoring of access statistics by Analytics and Big Data tools; use of artificial intelligence with Watson (IBM); and Portal mobile application.

In her speech at the commemorative seminar, the portal coordinator also resumed the tool journey since its creation, presenting the milestones to the present day, with acquisition of new technologies and projects to improve the user experience. The timeline revealed that the partnership with RNP is longstanding.
 

The future timeline is being built. For the next 10 years of the Portal, some goals have been established and will remain supported by RNP: establishment of partnership with new institutions; expansion of the collection available on the Portal; cost reduction of the contract content; preservation of the proper content in digital repositories; evolution of the Portal technologies, such as expansion to cloud computing, extensive use of artificial intelligence for cataloging and retrieving of content; implementation of machine learning techniques for cost and access forecast; adherence to LGPD; expansion of open data availability and hackaton; integration with other systems, such as CONECTI; and adoption of unique identifiers and standardized technologies worldwide, such as ORCID.