Open Access in the Czech Republic
Repositories | Organisations | Projects | Journals | Copyright | Funding | Publishers | News | Other
Open Access Repositories
In the Czech Republic was started system theses.cz to collect Czech ETDs and search for traces of plagiarism in theses. It represents a nationwide (and not only that) register of theses and all the information related to these (see EVSKP-MS metadata below). The system allows the representatives of the schools participating in the project to upload their students' theses into it and search these for instances of plagiarism.
To access full text users must most often register in university libraries.
Open Access Organisations/Groups
Electronic Theses and Dissertation Working Group (ETDs Working Group)
The ETDs Working Group started its activities in 2004. It has 28 members, i.e. 19 of them are from public universities and apart from them regular guests out of the ACLU also participate at its activities. The main goals of the working group: to commence a process of standardization in the Czech Republic, introduce methodology activities to provide access to the ETDs, to react to the development of publishing systems of ETDs abroad, to promote obligatory collection of e-versions, to create conditions to build a system of registering the ETDs on a national level.
Problems being solved: internal regulations, workflow model, descriptive metadata standard, register of local ETDs system in the Czech Republic, national surveys, organization of regular seminars. The group by its systematic activity played an important part in the change of social awareness in the Czech Republic and thus has prepared conditions to accept the idea of making the ETDs accessible and to solve the project of the national register on a national level.
Open Access Projects/Initiatives
National Register of ETDs (theses.cz)
In the Czech register are ETDs collected from local repositories in the National Register of ETDs (theses.cz).
The work on the National Register was already started by the Committee for theses at association of Libraries of Czech Universities (ACLU) in 2004, mainly aiming at its standardization. The main result of its activities was the preparation of the metadata proposal EVSKP-MS, later approved as standard in the Czech Republic. The National Register of ETDs was programmed and launched by the Masaryk University in Brno in 2008. The project was subsidized by the Czech Ministry of Education. Today there are 21 schools involved with almost 60 000 records.
The National Repository of Grey Literature (NRGL)
The http://www.stk.cz? (NTL) in collaboration with the University of Economics, Prague (VŠE) runs a project to build the National Repository of Grey Literature. Project is planned for the years 2008-2011.
The project shall provide a working pilot application, which shall form the basis of the National Repository of Grey Literature. Having evaluated technology and methodology testing, project members shall formulate Standards and Recommendations for institutions establishing their own local repositories. Members of the project are working on metadata specifications, choice of relevant persistent identifiers, an analysis of typology of documents, software specifications for the model application and presentation of web pages.
The NRGL project continues in the work of thesis.cz, its contents and apart from other, it is supposed that to collect ETDs data from the National Register of Theses and other local repositories. The National Repository of Grey Literature will support data export to other repositories via the OAI-PMH protocol.
The Czech Digital Library
Projects under the umbrella of deposit digital date include the Czech Digital Library. This is a new national plan to integrate different library repositories in the Czech Republic with repositories of other cultural heritage institutions. Large national projects in the area of digitization have been functioning for more than ten years, combined with other regional, subject- oriented, institutional, and other projects. These more or less isolated projects have produced millions of digitized pages accompanied by metadata. The project aims to bring closer cooperation and coordination of these initiatives (source: paper prepared for the conference Archiving 2006, Ottawa, Canada, May 24-26,, 2006 by Bohdana Stoklasová, National Library of the Czech Republic).
Open Access Journals
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Copyright
In the Czech Republic there is inaccuracy and inconsistency in the latest amendments of the Copyright Act (No. 121/2000 Coll.) in relation to the ETDs. It causes certain ambiguous interpretation of law / the obligation to make the ETDs accessible at universities. Therefore it results in different conduct of schools and various solutions: Open Access x access only on the basis of license agreements x access only for the intranet of a respective school x no publishing.
Funding Policies
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Publishers and Open Access
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Current Local News & Events
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Other Topics
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Contributor's contact details
Jan Mach
University of Economics, Prague
Electronic Theses and Dissertation Working Group, chairman
e-mail: machj@vse.cz
Page last modified: August 03, 2009, at 10:32 AM