Open Access in Poland

Repositories | Organisations | Projects | Journals | Copyright | Funding | Publishers | News | Other

Open Access Repositories

As of April 2008, there are 30 universities and a number of higher academic schools in Poland. Individual, mostly institutional, repositories begin to emerge at some universities, like Repozytorium Eny in Wrocław University of Technology or ABC AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków. Not all of them are OAI-PMH compliant. For subject based repositories - the best known and most used is Polish Mathematical Collection, soon to be moved onto a new platform.

Open Access Organisations/Groups

Poland is in the unique position, being the only EU DRIVER country that at the same same time is within the scope of interest of EIFL organization. This opens important opportunities for DRIVER to promote in the former Soviet Union as well as other Eastern and developing countries.

Poland has already 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 largest wikipedia in the world (which for many years used to be the third largest after the English and the German 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.

Open Access Projects/Initiative

The major Open Access initiative is run under the auspices of the Virtual Library of Science (VLS), which, over the years became extremely popular in Poland, with over 10 thousand full text articles being downloaded daily. Over last 15 years, VLS, based on a consortium model, and co-founded by the Polish Ministry for Science, provided massive access to mostly licensed content of over XXX articles to academic institutions in Poland. With the recent paradigm shift, the national project will aim to consolidate licensed and open access published digital library resources as well as the repositories into a seamless, single-point of shopping system. To this end, an integrated software platform, YADDA is being prepared by ICM.

Besides VLS, also a number of traditional libraries are present electronically in Poland. As of April 2008, there were over 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 Poland 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 (like BAZTECH, PSCJ, AGRO or BAZHUM), Open Access journals, the repositories of digitized copyright-expired publications, new born digital contents, and the licensed content from the major publishers.

Open Access Journals

According to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) there are 48 Polish OA journals, mostly from technology or live sciences. These journals are usually hosted by individual institutes of Polish universities or Polish Academy of Sciences.

According to a survey of Polish academic publishers conducted by ICM in 2007, over 1/3 of the journals publishers would be 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 are available online.

Copyright

Usually, the authors of the book publications retain most of their copyrights, while the authors of articles tend to cede much of their rights to the publishers.

Funding Policies

VLS is co-funded by Polish Ministry of Science and by the consortium members.

Publishers and Open Access

A survey of Polish academic publishers was conducted by ICM in 2007, showing that a portion of them was considering an option to publish under open licenses.

Current Local News & Events

On March 8, 2008, in Toruń, a national Open Access initiative was presented at the Conference of Rectors of Polish Universities meeting.