The National Research Environment

How are Research Institutions (universities, research centers) organised nationally?

Slovenia is a country of two million inhabitants. The principles and goals of the national research environment are defined in the Research and Development Act, which also defines how research and development policy is implemented, how it is financed from government funds and other sources (European programmes and frameworks, local communities and business enterprises), and the organisation of national and research environment. Research and development activities are carried out by research institutions in the form of programmes and projects and by private researchers in the form of projects, stemming in the National Research and Development Programme. The act states that the results of research and development activities, financed from government funds, should be made publicly available with the only limitations being those, set by regulations on intellectual property, authors’ rights and personal data.

Research  and development is carried out at approx. 800 research institutions. There are three public universities: the University of Ljubljana, the University of Maribor and the University of Primorska. The largest among the private higher education institutions is the University of Nova Gorica. These four universities form the Rectors’ Conference of the Republic of Slovenia. The largest research institutes in Slovenia are the Jožef Stefan Institute, Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, National Institute of Chemistry, Institute of Oncology  and Agricultural Institute of Slovenia. The umbrella interest association of research institutes is KOsRIS (Coordination of Independent Research Institutions of Slovenia).

Data on Slovenian researchers, organisations, research groups, projects and programmes are available via Slovenian current research information system SICRIS (personal bibliographies of researchers also used for research evaluation).

Major research funders

Major funders of research nationally are Slovenian Research Agency and Slovenian Technology Agency, which finance the research policies of the Ministry of Higher Education, Science and Technology. They have not yet formulated open access policies or set mandates on depositing publications or data from publicly financed research into open access repositories.

EC research funding

Slovenia spends 1,66 % of its gross national product to finance research and development activities (data for 2008). 6% of this R &D expenditure is funded from abroad. The actual share of foreign research funding per institution varies, the institution receiving the largest share is the Jožef Stefan Institute. Its revenues from EU framework programmes amounted to 4,7 mio EUR in 2008, which is app. 11% of total 2008 institute's revenues.

Open Access and Repositories

Is there an awareness of Open Access within the research community nationally?

The awareness level of open access to scientific publications and data is low within the Slovenian research community with sporadic enthusiastic researchers supporting the green (open access repositories) or gold (open access publishing) open access road or experimenting with it and in some cases complying with open access requirements of projects.

There are no funder or institutional mandates in Slovenia for depositing publications from publicly financed research into open access repositories. None of Slovenian's higher education or research institutions have signed any of the open access declarations or established an institutional repository of research publications. There is no joint policy towards publishing of open access journals.

The Rectors’ Conference of the Republic of Slovenia supported the establishment of a national repository of research publications and data, which could be connected to the existing Slovenian current research information system (SICRIS). Considering the size of Slovenia and its research environment, this would help to avoid the duplication of effort and address the issue of the lack of relevant expertise at individual higher education or research institutions and at the same time it would enable efficient curation of electronic scientific output for long term use. A national repository would not exclude the individual institutions from setting up and maintaining their own institutional repositories.

Open Access repositories

What is the current status and distribution of OA repositories nationally?

There are currently four DRIVER compliant repositories in Slovenia: Digital Library of Slovenia – dLib.si (serves as national DRIVER aggregator), Digital Library of the University of Maribor – DKUM (currently archiving electronic theses, plans include archiving of research publications), ePrints.FRI (electronic theses and research publications repository of the Faculty of Informatics of the University of Ljubljana) and ELPUB (discontinued after the completion of the project). Four other electronic theses and dissertations repositories are also in operation, but are not compliant with DRIVER. Other solutions include links to theses and dissertations from institutional web sites or via Slovenian union catalogue records.

Social Science Data Archives (member of CESSDA) stores quantitative data from Slovenian research in social sciences. Data is freely available for education and research purposes and reasonably charged for commercial uses.

Open Access publishing

What is the current status of OA journals published nationally?

Twenty open access journals, published by Slovenian institutions, are registered in the Directory of Open Access Journals (the most prominent of these being Acta Chimica Slovenica with an impact factor 1,093 for 2007 and 0,909 for 2008).

The survey showed that open access journals in Slovenia are more numerous, but not all are registered with DOAJ.

Scientific and professional journals, which are co-financed by the Slovenian Research Agency, are required to deposit their electronic versions with the Digital Library of Slovenia. Fifty-six of them currently meet this obligation resulting in 13.725 available articles (some e-versions are embargoed for one or more years, for some only digitised older volumes are available).

Open access monographs are not published in Slovenia.

There are some open educational resources for specific topics. For example, the portal of worldwide acceptance VideoLectures.NET, which was built and is maintained by the Jožef Stefan Institute.

Open Access organisations and groups

There are no organized open access groups or web sites nationally, again the enthusiastic individuals (researchers or librarians) spread the knowledge and information (on a most regular basis via an e-mail list maintained by this author).

Partnering in the OpenAIRE project with the establishment of a National Liaison Office and its activities will help to raise the awareness of researchers, universities’ and institutes’ managers, funders and librarians towards open access and will hopefully serve to open access to results of Slovenian researchers.

Contributors Contact Details and Contact details of the National Open Access Desk

Dr Mojca Kotar

Assistant Secretary General

University of Ljubljana

University Office of Library Services

Kongresni trg 12

SI-1000 Ljubljana

Slovenia

Ph.: +386 1 2418 679

E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Date: 31 March 2010