Open access publishing in Lithuania and Serbia

EIFL has provided small grants to support open access publishing initiatives in Lithuania and Serbia:

• Promoting open access via implementing Open Journal System by Lithuanian research journals, a project of the Association of Lithuanian Serials in partnership with the Lithuanian Research Libraries Consortium.

• Supporting Serbian journal publishers in switching to the article processing charges OA model, a project of the Centre for Evaluation in Education and Science, Belgrade (CEON/CEES), in partnership with the National Library of Serbia and in cooperation with the Ministry of Science of Serbia, all state universities and with the journal editors.

More information about the project in Lithuania
The survey of the Association of Lithuanian Serials showed that the majority of Lithuanian research journals were just uploaded to simple websites, and this approach lacks visibility and interoperability. As a follow up to the international conference “The Possibilities of Disseminating Lithuanian Research Journals Worldwide” with more than 140 scientists, librarians and publishers attending the event organized by the Lithuanian Research Library Consortium and the Association of Lithuanian Serials during the Open Access Week 2010 (the 21st October 2010), 20 research journals decided to start using the Open Journal Systems (OJS) – a FOSS journal management and publishing system that has been developed by the Public Knowledge Project. OJS will assist the journals with every stage of the refereed publishing process, from submissions through to online publication and indexing, as well as will help to expand and improve access to research.

Vilnius Gediminas Technical University (6 journals), International School of Law and Business (2 journals), Mykolas Romeris University (4 journals), The Association of Lithuanian Serials (1 journal), Health Sciences journal, The Lithuanian Statistic Society journal, and Šiauliai University (5 journals) – will be installing OJS and sharing experience with other editorial boards. The Association of Lithuanian Serials will also disseminate recommendations to other members (15 institutions publishing over 70 journals) and will share experiences at local and international conferences, publishing articles and organizing a conference in October 2011.

For more information about Lithuanian research journal publishing see a recent article in the ScieCom info, Nordic-Baltic Forum for Scientific Communication, March 2011 Issue written by the project coordinator Eleonora Dagienė, Vilnius Gediminas Technical University. The article describes “Changes in Lithuanian Research Journal Publishing in 2009–2010” and how Lithuanian scholarly publishers are adapting to the new publishing environment. 

More information about the project in Serbia
In Serbia open access publishing has been systematically promoted from 2000 on, especially through activities of the consortium of academic libraries (KoBSON) and its cooperation with EIFL. So far four workshops on Open Access have been organised in 2003, 2005, 2007 and 2009. As a result, Serbia became among the first countries in the region to widely accept open access publishing. Now, practically all Serbian peer reviewed scientific journals are open access and are available in Digital Object Identifier (DOI) Repository of the National Library of Serbia and SCIndeks: the Serbian citation index – a service of the Centre for Evaluation in Education and Science in cooperation with National Library of Serbia, financed by the Ministry of Science and Technological Development of the Serbian Government.

The project will help the journal publishers to cope with the severe journal budget cuts provided by the Ministry of Science, practically the only journal funder in Serbia. One of the journals (International Journal of Electrochemical Science), founded in 2006, started practicing article processing charges from the early beginning and made a great success. Many other journals in SCIndeks, expressed the same intention, but came across technical difficulties in trying to introduce the model.   

The project will map all publishing business models practiced among Serbian proefesional journals indexed in SCIndeks to identify journals interested in switching to article processing charges model and select those that have a real potential to successfully practice this business model; will provide the editors/publishers with article processing charges organizataional know how; and will upgrade SCIndeks with a service enabling them to collect article processing charges from authors, their insitutions and funders.

The projects will be implemented in April - December 2011.

This programme is supported by Information programme, Open Society Foundations.

Grant recipients will be featured on the EIFL website and Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS).

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