Authenticus is a software platform that automatically associates publication authors to known researchers and corresponding publication records to Portuguese institutions, aiming at building a national repository of scientific publications. Authenticus has been designed and implemented to provide researchers and institutions with a set of functionalities and tools to fulfil such goal, namely it provides:

• a multicriteria identification algorithm to automatically associate publication authors to known researchers and publications to Portuguese institutions;
• specialized interfaces for researchers and institutions to access data and indicators, and allow them to confirm their publications, or dismiss wrong associations in a simple but effective way;
• automatic upload capabilities of publications indexed by well known commercial sources for which the institutions hold a license, such as Web of Science from Clarivate, Scopus from Elsevier, CrossRef, but also from non-commercial sources such as DBLP (specialized in Computer Science). The recent releases of the Authenticus System introduced automatic import of publication metadata from Unpaywall, Openlibrary and import of publications by HandleID;
• automatic detection of duplicated publications metadata originated from multiple sources, and ability to merge duplicates into just one Authenticus record while keeping the original identifiers;
• dynamic updates of citation information from multiple sources;
• an integrated view of the journals and venues where the publications occur.
• multiple export formats so that researchers or institutions can synchronize data with other systems;
• synchronize with ORCID, both for Import and for Export of the researchers' list of publications;
• import of publications from CIÊNCIAVITAE
• initial bibliometric indicators about researchers and institutions.

The development of Authenticus started in 2010 with the development of the identification algorithm. It initially was planned just for the University of Porto, thus for a smaller scale, and just with one main developer. Its interface was Web based and developed using the CakePHP framework . In 2013, the project lead by Professor Fernando Silva from FCUP and CRACS/INESC TEC, received the support from FCT and its scope became national. While on one hand this was an opportunity, it brought more responsibility to the leading team, since the requirements for both efficiency and scalability became more demanding, as one needed to be prepared to efficiently support hundreds or even thousands of users simultaneously. The development team increased, the design of Authenticus was completely revised, and it was re-implemented with a new design architecture.

Authenticus archives publications indexed by major bibliographic indexing databases. Thus, access to the full functionalities of Authenticus is restricted to users with b-On access that are also able to authenticate using the Federated Authentication service provided by FCCN.

Currently, Authenticus aggregates publications data from: