Slovak Open Science Forum 2025

The Slovak Open Science Forum conference was held in the Palffy palace, in the heart of Bratislava, this year. It was organized by Slovak Centre of Scientific and Technical Information under the patronage of UNESCO. The conference was attended by over 70 participants. It hosted speakers from the Czech Republic, Croatia, France, Netherlands and Slovakia. 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 speaker Ezra Clark (UNESCO) was talking in his presentation "Towards equitable scholarly communication: Implementing the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science" about the roles and benefits of Open Science, the UNESCO recommendation on Open Science. He was also talking about key findings from the first consolidated global monitoring effort in which 81 countries were involved. The key challenges are: 70% of all scientific publications are locked behind paywalls, insufficient infrastructure, capacity gaps, concerns around intellectual property & research security, geopolitical constraints, persisting inequalities in access to science, technology and innovation further exacerbated by language barriers and digital divides, inadequate funding, high costs associated with open access publishing and models that rely on article processing charges (APCs).

The second speaker Iva Melinscak Zlodi (University of Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and social Sciences and SPARC Europe) was talking about „The Role of Diamond Open Access in the Future of Scholarly Publishing". In her presentation, she showed an overview of different European national publishing landscapes and talked about the key EU-funded projects for diamond OA (DIAMAS, CRAFT-OA and ALMASI). The results from the DIAMAS survey (with 685 respondents across the ERA) showed that there is an increase the 'diamondisation' of the European institutional publishing landscape. The most important differences can be observed between individual countries within regions – countries within the same region can exhibit markedly different practices.

The third speaker Jan Černý (Prague University of Economics and Business) had presentation about "AI and Intellectual property rights". In his presentation, he tried to find answers to 2 questions: Is AI going to replace human creativity, or will it become our most powerful creative assistant? and What are — and what will be — the legal consequences of an AI-driven society for authorship, inventorship, and ownership? He also talked about challenges such as the fact that over 70% of patent applications are now coming from Asia, particularly China, Korea, and Japan. The risk of innovation gaps is even higher now due to the AI-generated content.

The fourth speaker Hana Heringová (National Library of Technology) was talking about "Persistent Identifiers and Support of their Implementation in Czechia". She presented library support for Open Science – CzechELib services, methodological support for research data, academic services, the National Centre for Persistent Identifiers and National Open Science Platform. Open science is also for the first time directly captured in law, including the principles of publishing research results – documents and research data. She also spoke about future plans and challenges: raising awareness about the value of PIDs, creation of a National PID strategy, support for PIDs during the creation of repositories within the EOSC CZ initiative, implementation of PIDs into the National CRIS IS VaVaI and other key systems, introducing DOIs for grants in Czechia.

The fifth speaker Natascha Pargas (Springer Nature) was talking about "Open access publishing and workflows for Slovakia TA". In her presentation, she was speaking about 3 topics: Springer Nature Transformative Agreement, Data on Slovakia's Transformative Agreement and Specific Transformative Agreement Workflows. The presentation showed that total hybrid OA and subscription publications in Slovakia increased by 33% during the years 2022-2024.

The sixth speaker Katarina Skokanova (Department of Ecology and Environmental Science, Constantine the Philosopher, University in Nitra) presented Citizen Science in Slovakia: Preliminary results of the survey. In her presentation, she spoke about basic information about the survey, used methodology and purpose of the questionnaire. She also involved the conference participants with a quiz about the state of citizen science in Slovakia. Apart from that, she presented the main findings such as the obstacles in implementation, current needs and recommendations for organisations and schools.

The seventh speaker Jitka Dobbersteinova (Slovak Centre of Scientific and Technical Information presented „Development of open access in Slovakia ". She described the development of open access in Slovakia since 2010, showed the growth in institutional policies at Slovak universities and open access publishing in selected countries in Europe. She also talked about the infrastructure in Slovakia at the institutional and national level. Another topic was transformative agreements with Springer Nature, Elsevier, Lippincott and IEEE. She also talked about challenges and future of Open Science (e.g. new project – The Ecosystem of open science: open access publishing without barriers).

For the first time, the conference also hosted a poster session with citizen science projects. The representatives of citizen science projects such as Slovak Flora (iNaturalist) and PLADIAS.SK, Bird Hour, Living Bratislava or Dragonflies (Odonata) of Slovakia spoke about their experience with mapping different types of birds, small animals, or plants. The conference attendees could learn about new ways how to protect our environment.