Open Access at IMOC PAS

Details: Category: Uncategorised; Published: 22 February 2023; Created: 22 February 2023; Hits: 799

What is Open Access policy?

Open Access (OA) policy is a set of solutions applied by individual academic and educational units, encompassing broadly defined open science. This range of practices facilitates a free-of-charge access to scientific publications and research data distributed online, free of many technological barriers, such as requirement of creating a password-protected account. Open Access carries beneficial value for both readers and authors. The readers enjoy easy access to available literature, while authors are given the opportunity to disseminate results of their research, wider visibility, and subsequently, citations, the number of which offers a direct reflection of their influence in the field. It is a solution that side-steps embargoes put in place by the majority of traditional and hybrid journals. In this respect, Open Access is promoted by the majority of the scientific community, with a key member, Professor Stevan Harnard, a Hungarian-born cognitive scientist and researcher, as its leading advocate.

Creative Commons (CC) licences provide authors publishing Open Access with copyright protection.

Open Access policy allows more than the ability to access academic publications alone. According to openscienceasap.org, it should also include an open access to methodology, software, data, the peer review process and educational resources. In their postulates from 2021, the UNESCO goes even further, suggesting an open access to: publications, research data, software, equipment, evaluation, scientific infrastructure, educational resources, community input, embracing diversity of sciences, openness to all scientific knowledge and inquiry, and acceptance of indigenous knowledge systems.

Open Access (OA)

The concept of Open Access itself isn’t new; it was already broached in the 1990s. The term - Open access - itself was coined and proposed by the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) created in 2001. All interested, individuals as well as institutions, can sign the declaration of the Open Access Initiative. It is the Initiative that first identified the main goals of Open Access, which include: ability to read, download, copy, distribute, print, browse and link the content of [academic] articles, ensuring authors’ control over the integrity of their work under copyright. The global shift towards an open science is evident through the numerous legal and illegal initiatives.

One of the important steps in promoting the concept was an introduction of the catalogue of journals available in Open Access in 2003. The continuously expanding catalogue currently counts over 12 thousand journals, available free of the Article Processing Charge (APC - a publication fee charged to authors or institutions they are employed by). The catalogue with the browser of journals can be accessed at https://doaj.org/.

Regarding the matters of open science, one of the most active units in Poland is the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling at the University of Warsaw (ICM UW), which has been working towards the OA concept since the 1990s. Between 2014 -2020 a database under the name of Library of Science (previously known as CEON) was established. It currently provides access to over 450 thousand full-text publications, and includes over 1500 journals and nearly 750 books. Furthermore, the Library, together with other scientific institutions such as universities, institutes of science, associations and foundations, has formed the Coalition for Open Education (KOED), which promotes open science and considers new legislations regarding science (e.g. Act 2.0). Available on the Coalition’s website is a broad range of information, including elaborations on copyright, Creative Commons agreements (CC BY, CC BY-SA) and a variety of the Coalition’s initiatives, such as the independent website dedicated to open science. The Coalition remains open to new institutional members.

Open Access and grants

Individual scientists are not the only ones to take issue with a lack of access to knowledge and a major part of publications. For some time now, the science-funding institutions have also started to recognise the problem. Thanks to launching of the cOAlition S by 13 coalition members, including the National Science Centre in Poland, open access to all of the publications from research financed by national agencies (NCN guidelines and information available here, as well as here and here) has applied since January 2020. To any interested parties: further details regarding cOAlition S and the proposed Plan S are available at https://www.coalition-s.org/. Recently, the problem with accessibility to scientific content has also been acknowledged by the European Parliament, by setting a legal framework for the Open Access policy in the Horizon 2020 programme. Implementation of these regulations is overseen by the European Commission, who have released a manual addressing implications of the regulations on grant projects submitted in the programme.