Slovak National Strategy for Open Science 2021 - 2028

At the beginning of June 2021, The National Strategy for Open Science 2021 - 2028, with its first Action Plan 2021 - 2022, was adopted by the Slovak government (both in the Slovak language are uploaded below, English version of the National Strategy also). The creation of the National Strategy is an integral part of the Action Plan of the Open Government Partnership Initiative 2020-2021. The Slovak Centre of Scientific and Technical Information (Slovak NOAD) actively participated on preparing the National Strategy for Open Science and its Action Plan.

The National Strategy for Open Science aims to improve the availability of the Slovak science results and change the system of research and evaluation processes towards higher transparency, reproducibility, and integrity. It also aims to harmonize Slovak science and research with the Recommendation of the EU of 2012 on access to and preservation of scientific information and its 2018 update and with the Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe Guidelines on the rules of open access to scientific publications and research data. It also reflects a significant development at the European Union level related to open science and open access, such as the 2016 European Council Conclusions on the transition towards an Open Science system, the "Plan S," the developments of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), while taking into account the Slovak conditions for the science and research development. The National Strategy follows the Research and Innovation Strategy for Smart Specialization and the 2021–2024 Manifesto of the Government of the Slovak Republic. The National Strategy is also connected with other vital documents of Slovakia and the EU that consider open government; support for open science and open access publishing; open society; open data; participatory, open, and transparent public administration and governance; open internet and open markets.

The National Strategy aims to create a sustainable paradigm of participation of all stakeholders interested in science and research in Slovakia in the implementation of open science global principles in disseminating, mutual sharing, reusing, and making research outputs available in Slovakia, and thus to support the development of domestic and international scientific collaboration, public and private sectors collaboration, scientific structure enhancement, education of new generations of researchers and higher education teachers, and creation of an environment of quality strategic research management and education.

The implementation of Open Science principles into the Slovak research and development (R&D) environment is connected with a whole complex of legal instruments that constitute a legislative framework for the regulation and management of the existence and scope of individual parts of the R&D sector structure and other specific measures such as copyright. Thus, implementing OS principles at the national level affects at least ten laws constituting a legislative framework for R&D regulation in Slovakia.

The technical infrastructure for Open Science to preserve data in Slovakia lags behind other European countries. While mapping—among other things—the area of institutional research data repositories, the EC Open Science Monitor points out their lower number in Slovakia. The situation is better with institutional digital storage systems that are mainly used to store and provide internal access to the institution's publication outputs or the institution's section. Higher education institutions usually ensure storing and preserving publication output through academic libraries, the Slovak Academy of Sciences through its Central Library. However, the internal rules of research institutions are not set to ensure publishing of the employee's output primarily under a public license. Therefore, the access conditions differ from institution to institution, depending on the type of research publication or data.

The National Strategy covers the following topics:

1. Open access to publicly funded publications
2. Open access to scientific data
3. The technical infrastructure for Open Science
4. Open Science financing
5. Protection of intellectual property rights
6. Usage of existing open IT tools and open data
7. Open Science education
8. Evaluation of R&D with principles of Open Science
9. Citizen Science support