Servei de Documentació i Accés al Coneixement (SEDAC)

The introduction of ICTs in the Barcelona City Council starting in the 1990s, as a strategy for improving public service, entailed the publication of municipal documents in digital format, initially just on a small scale and then becoming more generalised from the year 2000 onwards. 

The City Council General Library (currently SEDAC), as the body responsible for the dissemination and conservation of the digital documentation for public dissemination, started archiving these documents systematically as they were published. Initially, these documents were organised by collection, were stored in a digital deposit called DIGIBAB, and were linked and catalogued with MARC21 in the  Biblioteques de Barcelona Catalogue (CBAB)   and in the Collective Catalogue of Universities of Catalonia (CCUC)  . The DIGIBAB was very limited and, as the years went by, it started to become technologically and functionally obsolete.

In 2014, Barcelona City Council decided to make the change and introduce a new institutional repository. This initiative formed part of the global open access movement, the aim of which was to guarantee open access, interoperability and the discovery of municipal documents on digital networks, which would enable the reuse of the content by third parties. With this change, the City Council’s aim was to foster public awareness of the municipal activities found in the Council’s public documents. They also wanted to promote the exchange of ideas within the framework of best practices for accessing knowledge, as well to help ensure compliance with the legal requirements set out in Spanish State Act 19/2013, of 9 December and Catalan Act 19/2014, of 29 December, both on transparency and good governance, and Act 37/2007, of 16 November and Law 18/2015, of 9 July, on the reuse of public sector information. At that time, the DIGIBAB deposit contained around 10,000 digital documents that were accessible through the CBAB and CCUC catalogues, which were then migrated to the new repository. 

On 23 March 2015, the Mayor approved by Mayoral Decree the Circular  that provided for the creation and launch of the new institutional repository BCNROC and regulated an open access policy to the documentation for public dissemination produced by municipal departments. The most open Creative Commons licenses possible were adopted in accordance with the content of the documents, with the aim of ensuring free access, at no cost to citizens, and with the minimum legal and financial restrictions possible while promoting the reuse of content.

BCNROC and the directives for open access to municipal publications were launched on 1 October 2015. The body responsible for managing this institutional repository and for promoting the policy was the Documentation and Knowledge Access Service.

The departments responsible for producing the documents for public dissemination had to self-publish them on BCNROC so they would be immediately accessible from the repository itself and also through the various municipal channels on the Internet, particularly via the Open Government website   .

The general objectives are:

• To make visible to the world, to share, democratise and reuse the municipal knowledge found in the municipal documents published without any form of legal, financial or technological restrictions. 
• To offer access by default to municipal knowledge, immediately and online, without citizens or machines having to request prior permission to do so. This is known as the right to access.

Specific objectives of the BCNROC:

• To foster the discovery and raise the visibility of Barcelona City Council documents and their metadata on digital networks from multiple repositories. 
• To guarantee the storage, management and present and future accessibility of these documents, in a way that is simple, cost-free, freely accessible, complete, permanent, reusable and continuously updated. 
• To boost open access by facilitating the self-publication of municipal content by the recipients of the Circular  .
• To foster exchange, innovation and the reuse of Barcelona City Council documents. Any user with internet access can access the municipal documents published with the guarantee of being able to read them, download them, save them and reuse them, distribute them and even produce new works based on them, always taking into account the conditions of use.
• To highlight Barcelona City Council's digitised asset collections and make them known to the world, in general, and Barcelona citizens, in particular.
• To provide all the digital documents that form part of the open repository with a uniform resource identifier (URI) that will unequivocally identify, in a stable, constant and flexible way, each document on the digital networks. 
  
   

Benefits for society:

• It facilitates a basic democratic right, which is default access to public information without legal or financial restrictions. This means that the Barcelona City Council voluntarily consents in advance to citizens accessing its information as a fundamental human right.
• It reduces the digital divide because it does away with the need to pay to access content. The central idea is to provide equal access to public resources which have already been paid for through public budgets and taxes. It favours equal opportunities of access to municipal information, and it helps to bring about equal conditions for the most disadvantaged members of society, providing them with the same opportunities of economic equity and social development. Equal opportunities in accessing knowledge.
• Empowerment and improvement of people's lives. Municipal information affects people's lives, meaning that it is a source of wealth for those who access it and needs to be shared. Access to municipal knowledge helps to break the cycle of poverty and could form the basis for sustainable human development, which can transform societies and help to promote the development of the knowledge society.  The City Council shows that it is aware of the social dimension in municipal information.
• More opinion-forming and participation in local issues. Accessing local information equips us with the skills we need to make individual and collective decisions, which can help to boost participation in public matters.
• A social return on public investment, providing access to products that have been produced with public money. There is no need to pay for information that has already been paid for because it comes out of the public budget.
• It helps citizens keep the municipal administration in check. It makes the documentation accessible by default, without the need to request permission to access it, thereby improving transparency and open government.
• It speeds up the discovery of municipal knowledge because users can find the documents using search engines and the most widely used content aggregators (Google, Yahoo, Bing, Europeana...) from anywhere on the planet using mobile devices and social networks. Bigger audiences, more readers, more potential.
• It fosters collaborative work and prevents the duplication of efforts (increasing efficiency).
• It accelerates and encourages innovation. The faster the document reaches society, the faster any innovations can take place, and this helps to enrich education and stimulate the economy. It boosts the capacity for innovation and directly impacts research and investigation as the results can be quickly shared. The value of the investment is thus maximised through the widespread use of its results.
• It increases productivity. It builds on earlier results or ideas that have been self-published and therefore improves the quality of the results and helps find solutions to address the challenges of 21st century society.
• It boosts competitiveness. It transforms ideas into business (data mining, etc.).
• It promotes the advancement of knowledge because anyone, from anywhere, can contribute to it and share it. It helps to grow the knowledge society with new individual and collective visions.

Benefits for the City Council

• Greater visibility of municipal knowledge because it works with interoperable communication protocols. Bigger audiences and more followers.
• It increases the visibility of the institution and improves its positioning on Google and other search engines. It boosts the institution's global impact and means its work projects and studies will be cited more often.
• Permanent and persistent source of information on municipal knowledge, where people can search for and find documentation, very useful for digital learning and quick decision-making within the institution itself. It helps to improve policy formulation. Permanent access to works through permanent links (that are never taken down).
• It guarantees the institution's reputation for correctly managing copyright, by applying open licenses to all its works. It boosts the prestige of the City Council and ensures that the authorship of its works is recognised.
• It improves transparency and accountability in public investment.
• It boosts the reuse of public sector information to the benefit of everyone. It helps to ensure compliance with legal requirements with regard to transparency and reuse.
• It increases municipal efficiency because:
  • It is configured as a single, cross-departmental tool that is used by all municipal websites that disseminate documents online, and this results in savings in terms of effort and dedicated resources.
  • It standardises the vocabulary, descriptive metadata, management of copyright and information publication procedures across all municipal departments.
  • It can be integrated with different technologies for the management, processing and indexing of information resources throughout Barcelona City Council.
  • It stores digital documents, which are collective heritage, for the society of today and of the future. It assumes responsibility for document assets and complies with the Legal Deposit Act.
  • It makes Barcelona City Council a part of the global open knowledge movement, backed by declarations of social commitment as one of the best practices for updating knowledge and for promoting the democratic, participative and inclusive development of societies. BCNROC uses freeware.

It is an international movement endorsed by three declarations which have a broad social commitment (the Budapest Open Access Initiative, 2002; the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing, 2003; and the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities, 2003). It promotes universal access to knowledge, which is viewed as a public good: a common good to be shared freely and openly with everyone through digital networks.

Open access takes advantage of twenty-first century technologies (Internet) to publish documentation free of charge, without legal or technological barriers and in the interest of the common good.

According to the Budapest Declaration (2002):

‘By “open access” to this literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.’

Open access has been adopted internationally as one of the best practices for sharing knowledge and promoting transparency and the democratic, participatory and inclusive development of societies. Many European and international governments, institutions and organisations maintain open access policies for their publications.

Open access can be applied to any digital content, from raw data to images, audio, video, multimedia elements and software; it can be applied to digital works or to digitised old works, such as works in the public domain. It benefits the interests of many groups. For example, it gives authors a global audience and boosts the impact of their work; for readers/users, it provides the opportunity to access content without restrictions; it puts the most and the least advantaged on equal footing by eliminating the need to pay for reproducing content, and it allows governments to promote democracy by sharing unclassified government information with as many people as possible.

The Barcelona City Council is aware that knowledge of and access to public municipal documentation is an essential right and a useful and necessary tool for a fairer and more inclusive society. As such, it has made all published, digital or digitised municipal documents available to all citizens on the Internet by approving an open access policy to publicly disseminated digital documentation (Mayoral Decree of 23 March 2015) and the Internet launch of the open access institutional repository known as the BCNROC (Barcelona Open Knowledge Repository), where citizens can find, consult and reuse municipal publications openly and free of charge.

As the author, open access allows Barcelona City Council to be more transparent; to promote the exchange and creation of new ideas; to eliminate the gaps in access to public municipal documentation; to foster reflection and sharing of municipal knowledge for a fairer society; to make it easier to find this knowledge on digital networks; to enable it to be reused by interested third parties; and to preserve it digitally.

The open access policy to publications is part of a broader and more cross-cutting strategy of openness of municipal information resources. It is aligned with other initiatives that also pursue default access and reuse of municipal information, such as the Open Data BCN open data system. 

How does the City Council implement open access to digital publications?

1. It designs and approves an open access policy for its publications in the digital environment (it creates a mandate by Mayoral Decree of 23 March 2015, BOPB 29 March 2015).

2. It creates the institutional repository BCNROC according to the protocols and standards of the Open Access Initiative to ensure interoperability between global content aggregation systems and search engines.

3. It adopts working policies to ensure that documents and their metadata are open access: 

a)    Immediate and permanent access to documents:

As the author, the City Council publishes an electronic copy of the document in question in the repository, in original and machine-readable versions, at most one month after approval or depending on the embargo period (if there is one). In addition, it provides the descriptive metadata associated with each document, which identifies it, allows an efficient search experience and safeguards the city’s reputation. This gives it a constant URI that guarantees permanent access. (4 stars on the Tim Berners-Lee scale). 

b)    Documents that are open from a legal standpoint (with the application of Creative Commons licences):

As the author, the City Council grants an open licence to the document, the broader the better, so that third parties can use and reuse it.

c)    Open documents from a technological standpoint (with the application of non-proprietary formats): Documents must be made available in open formats that allow rapid reuse by humans and machines. 

d)    Documents that are open from a financial standpoint o(free of charge), without having to pay for access to them.

The legal deposit is a mechanism regulated by Act 23/2011, of 29 July, and managed by the Legal Deposit Office at the National Library. Its purpose is to collect, store and conserve all types of tangible or intangible documents which may be the object of dissemination, for sale or free, to guarantee the right of access to culture, information and research.

All analogue and digital publications are subject to this law. Online publications are also regulated by Royal Decree 635/2015, of 10 July, which further elaborates on the previous act. In accordance with this regulation, online publication is understood as information or content of any nature disseminated via an intangible electronic support, archived in a certain format and able to be identified and processed in a different way, which is the object of dissemination.

Article 3 of this Royal Decree specifically describes as the ‘[...] object of legal deposit, along with the metadata included, any type of website and publications contained, whether access is open or restricted; regardless of the production, publication or dissemination procedure; regardless of the support or tangible means of distribution or communication; regardless of the physical location of the server or servers used for dissemination on electronic networks; and regardless of the domain included in the publication, providing these contain bibliographical, sound, visual, audiovisual or digital heritage [...]’. The only documents excluded from legal deposit are internal public administration documents, or those which may be included in administrative records.

Article 10 of this same decree states that the Biblioteca de Catalunya, as a centre for the conservation of the legal deposit, can engage in partnership agreements with public or private entities with online distribution platforms for digital publications and resources that these same entities publish or produce. To be regarded as ‘secure repositories’, these entities must meet the minimum requirements set out by the Biblioteca de Catalunya. BCNROC fulfils all the rules for secure repositories and guarantees the preservation of municipal documents. It has been recognized by the Biblioteca de Catalunya as a secure repository for the conservation of the Legal Deposit for the electronic documentation generated by the Barcelona City Council. This distinction is made visible on the home page of the repository with a specific seal and has been formalized through an agreement between institutions.

As a result, and in accordance with current regulations, as a body that publishes or produces online publications, whether access is open or restricted, Barcelona City Council must provide the means for its online publications and the metadata that describe them to be able to be permanently viewed and reproduced in the future from a secure repository. One of the goals of Barcelona City Council’s institutional repository BCNROC is to facilitate access to and the permanent preservation of digital publications of municipal authorship, while respecting the regulations on intellectual property, the national framework for interoperability of the electronic administration, the technical international rules for metadata description and the principles stipulated by Act 19/2013, of 9 December, on transparency, access to public information and good governance.