About the Alice repository

The open access (OA) movement aims to promote the free availability, in a digital environment and without restrictions, of scientific knowledge, especially that resulting from research carried out with public funding. Started in the 2000s, the movement has grown and received support from renowned international and national institutions, including through declarations that present and update its principles, giving it a dynamic and transformative character.
Over the years, Embrapa has established several related open access initiatives, including being one of the first national institutions to launch its institutional open access repositories in 2011. This evolution is continuous and the institution has also sought to adhere to and promote open science practices, which present changes in the ways of doing science, favoring the sharing of resources, data and information.
The Embrapa Open Access Scientific Information Repository (Alice) is intended to gather, organize, store, preserve and disseminate in full scientific information produced by Embrapa and edited in book chapters, articles in indexed journals, articles in conference proceedings, theses and dissertations, technical notes, among other types of publications. It is a platform that significantly contributes to increasing the impact of research results and provides greater visibility for Embrapa and its technical-scientific staff.

Conception and Development

The Alice repository was developed within the scope of the Open Access to Scientific Information project at Embrapa. In its implementation, members of this project and various units of Embrapa acted together, with emphasis on the Embrapa Library System, the Permanent Commission for Ainfo, professionals in the areas of information science and computer science. The platform used to design the repositories is the DSpace free software.

Alice Structure

The digital publications in the Alice repository are organized into communities, which represent the company's units spread across the Brazilian territory. Each community, in turn, is structured into collections, composed of different types of publications:

  • Articles in indexed journals
  • Scientific books
  • Chapters in scientific books
  • Articles in conference proceedings
  • Abstracts in conference proceedings
  • Technical Notes and Scientific Notes
  • Thesis and dissertations
  • Texts for Discussion (Embrapa series)
  • other scientific publications.

In addition to being organized into communities and collections, documents are also grouped by authors, titles, subjects and date. Furthermore, to facilitate access to publications of interest to users, the Alice repository has an advanced and flexible search system, which searches for terms both in the Dublin Core metadata and in the full text of the documents.