Poland
As of April 2008, there are 30 universities and over one hundred of other
academic schools in Poland. Individual, mostly institutional, repositories
begin to emerge at some universities, like at Wroclaw University of Technology
or ABC AGH at the University of Science and Technology in Kraków.
Not all of them are OAI-PMH compliant. The best known and most used among
subject based repositories is the Polish Mathematical Society , soon to
be moved onto a new platform.
Poland has developed a good local tradition for Open Access
content, with the active involvement of organisations like Creative Commons
Poland. Poland was able to develop the fourth world largest wikipedia
(which for many years used to be the third largest after the English and
the German ones only).
A number of groups active in promoting electronic publishing exist in
Poland, like the BAZTECH consortium maintaining Polish Technical Journal
Contents database and providing an incentive for technology journals to
make their contents openly available online. Other similar initiatives
include AGRO for agricultural journals, Polish Scientific Journal Contents
, or BAZHUM for publications in humanities and social sciences.
The major Open Access initiative is run under the auspices of the Virtual
Library of Science (VLS) , which, during more than a decade of operation
on a countrywide scale, became extremely visible in Poland, with over
10 thousand full text articles being downloaded daily. VLS, based on a
consortium model, and co-founded by the Polish Ministry for Science and
Higher Education, provided massive access to mostly licensed content of
more than 10 million articles to academic community in Poland. With a
recent paradigm shift, the national project will aim to consolidate licensed
and open access published contents resources as well as the repositories
into a seamless, single-point of shopping system. To this end, an integrated
software platform YADDA is being developed by ICM.
Besides VLS, also a number of traditional libraries are present electronically
in Poland. As of April 2008, there were more than 10 local libraries online,
most of them OAI-PMH compliant.
At the same time, active steps are being taken to promote Open Access
ideas in the country through a number of events. A BOA blog portal about
Open Access provides recent information related to Open Access events
and initiatives.
It is planned that in 2008-2009 YADDA will be used to integrate the Open
Access bibliographic databases maintained by ICM (like BAZTECH, PSCJ,
AGRO or BAZHUM), Open Access journals, the repositories of digitized copyright-expired
publications, new born digital contents, the licensed content from the
major publishers along with multimedia contents and scientific data.
There are fourty eight Polish OA journals, according to the Directory
of Open Access Journals, mostly in engineering and life sciences. As a
rule those journals are hosted by individual units of Polish universities
or institutes of the Polish Academy of Sciences.
According to a survey of Polish academic publishers conducted by ICM in
2007, over a third of the journals publishers were ready to make full
texts of the articles published in their journals available in open repositories.
As of 2007, over 30% of the publishers declared that all full texts of
the articles from their journals were available online.
Usually, the authors of the book publications retain most of their intellectual
property rights, while the authors of articles tend to cede much of their
rights to the publishers. It is expected that with the awareness raising
campaign, authors will increasingly grant non-exclusive licenses to the
publishers.
Besides textual material, there are also a number of databases and data
repositories in Poland, like Protein Data Bank. It is planned that ICM
meteorological data repository (with records dating back 10 years) will
be made public in the form of an open database.
The DRIVER wiki may be a useful source of further information.
Are there developments in this country that you would like to inform the DRIVER community about? If so, please visit the DRIVER wiki. There you will find guest editors' contributions to the countries pages. Information about the easy process of editing pages and how to obtain a password can be found on the wiki under "PmWiki Software". We look forward to your visit.
Last updated: 14-Nov-2008