Report: More publications available online for free

The report "Open Science in Poland 2014. Diagnosis" describes, among others, the degree of "openness" of Polish science, shows why Polish scientists choose to publish in open access, which forms the open publication they favour. The report has been prepared as part of the Platform for Open Science.

The data presented in the report show that in Poland primarily scientific journals are open for all users. Nearly half (49 percent) of almost 2 thousand journals from the Ministry of Science and Higher Education list offer free access to their current issues on the internet.

Popularity of open publishing among researchers also increases. 59 percent researchers surveyed for the report declare to have made available their at least once in open access, but only less than 12 percent of them do it regularly. Almost 41 percent surveyed researchers do not share their work in this way.

Scientists provide open access primarily to scientific articles. This applies to almost 95 percent authors using open access as a means of disseminating the results of their work. More than 28 percent of them publish conference materials in the open model, more than 16 percent- books or parts thereof, and the 11 percent - reports and doctoral dissertations.

Researchers who choose to share their work for free online, mainly use open journals. 69 percent choose this method of publication. Almost 31 percent of this group of researchers place their work in foreign repositories, and only 17.5 percent in Polish repositories. A more popular solution is the website of the researcher’s institution. More than 24 percent respondents publish on these websites. 20 percent surveyed scientists place publications on their own websites.

According to the authors of the report, open scientific journals - as a place of publication - are the most popular among the representatives of medical science. Among all the open publication possibilities, more than 89 percent representatives of this field choose open journals. Humanists, more often than representatives of other disciplines, choose Polish repositories. In turn, representatives of sciences mostly use foreign repositories. Researchers in the field of science and social sciences most often use their own websites to share their work. Websites of the parent institutions are most commonly used by representatives of social and technical sciences.

74 percent respondents support open sharing of the results of all research financed with public funds. First institutional subject specific repositories are being established, in which researchers can place their work: articles, books, dissertations and reports. Currently, there are 22 such repositories.

The authors emphasize that for many years open access to knowledge has been an important element of policies of research institutions and research funding organisations, and increasingly of governments and international organizations. "Research funding organisations increasingly require that the results of the projects financed by them are made available in open access. Such an obligation is imposes, among others, by the National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust and the UK Research Councils. Solutions for openness are also adopted at the government level, for example in the U.S., Argentina and Spain" - reads the release sent to PAP.

Meanwhile - as stated in the discussion of the report - Poland still lacks institutional strategy for open access, and other important elements of open science, such as open data, have not yet been implemented.

The report, edited by Jakub Szprot, has been prepared by a team of authors from the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling, University of Warsaw, as part of the Platform for Open Science. The publication is available on the Platform for Open Science: http://pon.edu.pl/index.php/nasze-publikacje?pubid=13

PAP - Science and Scholarship in Poland

ekr/ agt/ mrt/

tr. RL