Slovak Open Science Forum 2024

The Slovak Centre of Scientific and Technical Information organised a Second Slovak Open Science Forum. The conference was held in Bratislava on November 14th, 2024 in Palffy palace. The conference was attented by over 60 participants. It hosted speakers from Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Hungary and Slovakia. The conference was held under the auspices of the Ministry of Education, Research, Development and Youth of the Slovak Republic. The conference brings the latest information in different areas of open science, including open access to research data, research data management, research assessment and citizen science. The conference presentations are available here.

The first presenter, Johan Rooryck (cOAlition S), with the presentation „cOAlition S: the road ahead", introduced a global alliance of 28 funders:

"With effect from 2021, all scholarly publications on the results from research funded by public or private grants provided by national, regional and international research councils and funding bodies, must be published in Open Access Journals, on Open Access Platforms, or made immediately available through Open Access Repositories without embargo."

Johan was also talking about RRS (Right retention Strategy) becoming mainstream and receiving broad support – with 50 universities in the UK and 14 in Norway have already adopted IRRP (Institutional Rights Retention Policies). He also talked about the Diamond Action Plan, a plan to align and develop common resources for the entire Diamond OA ecosystem, including journals and platforms, while respecting their cultural, multilingual, and disciplinary diversity.

The second presenter, Laetitia Bracco (University of Lorraine), was presenting "Monitoring Open Science beyond publications". In her presentation, she focused on the French Open Science monitor – building blocks are affiliation metadata, openness and thematic classification. She also showed the shift from monitoring publications to monitoring the whole ecosystem of open science. Laetitia also talked about main challenges which she divided into technical (too many identifiers, no global database for research data and software) and factual (low recognition in the individual assessment process, low awareness from researchers on the value of these research products). She also introduced a draft of Principles of Open Science Monitoring which is a starting point for Open Science Monitoring initiative.

The third presenter, Sandor Soós (Hungary Academy of Sciences), presented "Bibliometrics as a key to Open Access Publishing – but not the way you think of it":

"If two journals have the same impact factor, but one of them is part of Springer Nature and the other one is part of MDPI, it is a rather different quality."

Sandor also talked about how to unlock the potential of (biblio)metrics – that it is not necessarily alternative constructs, alternative measures and alternative data what is needed. And one of the benefits can be exploring and evidencing the inclusion of Open Science within scholarly communication.

The fourth presenter, Matej Antol (CERIT-SC), spoke about "Czech EOSC Initiative". In his presentation, he introduced 12 EOSC CZ working groups – 4 cross cutting and 8 thematic. He spoke about e-INFRA CZ – a single national e-INFRASTRUCTURE, which is a consortium of CESNET, IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center and CERIT-SC. Matej also provided first glimpses at the EOSC CZ services, such as a national "catch-all pilot" repository, national Metadata Directory, portal for persistent identificators, Sensitive cloud, Data Stewardship Wizard, Fair implementation profile wizard and Authentication and authorization infrastructure.

The fifth presenter, Rita Pinhasi (University of Vienna), presented insights into "Open Access publishing in Austria". In her presentation, she spoke about key funders (Austrian Academic Library Consortium, Austrian Science Fund and project Austrian Transition to Open Access), goals and features of transformative agreements, which they have had since 2016, and support for diamond initiatives. She also talked about a new consortial cost-sharing model and challenges ahead such as remaining questions of sustainability and equity and the fact that transition to Open Access appears to have slow down.

The sixth presenter, Mária Kadlec (SpringerNature), with the presentation "Accelerating Open Science with tools not rules", talked about how tools are better than rules that in past SpringerNature or funders (Horizon Europe or US National Institutes of Health) had. She also talked about SpringerNature makes it easier to share preprints, open up and make peer review more transparent, share experimental designs, which is improving reproducibility, reviewing and sharing codes and research data.

The last presenters were Lucia Glajšeková and Alica Kubeková (Comenius University), and they talked about "The use of citizen science in the monitoring of animal species". They talked about how citizen science is a helpful and practical method of obtaining extensive datasets. They also showed two citizen science projects in Slovakia and talked about their own experience with the project "The norward spread of praying Mantises", and how they also managed to discover new spieces in Slovakia.