Elenara Chaves E. de Almeida, General Coordinator of Serials Access for CAPES, visited Emerald's headquarters in Bingley, UK, in November. This was the perfect opportunity for to find out more about Brazilian consortium CAPES. Interview by Tutilla Aragao.

What are CAPES’s main activities, and what distinguishes the organisation from other consortia?
Capes is a public institution, linked to the Ministry of Education, responsible for graduate education in Brazil (Master and PhD courses). Its role includes evaluation of such courses, access and communication of scientific production, investment on preparation of high level human resources (as professors and researchers) and promotion of international and scientific information.

Therefore, our virtual library, called Capes’ Portal de Periodicos is only one of our programs. As we are part of government we can not be considered as a traditional consortium. The member institutions do not pay to access the content we subscribe. They have free access since they fill some requirements established by the Ministry of Education. Moreover, the centralization of subscription resources attends not only economic criteria, but also the governmental politics to promote the democratization of the access for scientific knowledge in Brazil, car we believe in its benefits to Brazilian Science and the whole society.

What benefits do you bring to your members?
First of all, they have free access to our content. They may also participate of the choices about which collections / content we will subscribe – as we are a public institution, we think that such choices might attend their demands. Finally, we are continually developing new resources and functionalities that could improve the access and the use of scientific information available at Capes’ Portal de Periodicos, as we made recently by launching a new system that allows federate search in our content.

How does the collaboration between CAPES and Emerald benefit your members?
Emerald is always open to discuss with Capes about the best solutions to improve the access to scientific content in Brazil. We use to say that our collaboration with publishers are more than a simple commercial relationship, we consider them as partners in our mission to work for the improvement of Brazilian research and graduate education. And Emerald is an important partner in such mission. Its content is important to our professors and students. I also would like to mention Emerald’s initiative for creating a research award addressed to Brazilian researchers on LIS and Management. I think it is a great manner to encourage more researchers in Brazil to develop projects in such knowledge areas

What are CAPES plans for the future?
Specifically for Capes’ Portal de Periodicos, our main plans comprise: 1) Consolidating the use of federate search tool by our members; 2) Improving the access of Portal de Periodicos’ content by our members; 3) Developing open access initiatives in Brazil with the support of publishers.

What about your collaboration with Emerald?
We would like to encourage more the use of the content published by Emerald by Brazilian academic community. For example, we are discussing with Emerald the possibility of publishing books and journals in Portuguese.

For all enquiries regarding Emerald's relationship with CAPES, contact Tutilla Aragao, taragao@emeraldinsight.com