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The National Research Environment

The Parliamentary Committee for S&T Development proposes to the parliament the laws regulating the area of research. Two parallel bodies concerning R&D were established: 

  1. Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development (MESTD) - manages and develops S&T in Serbia and is responsible for fulfilment of the national obligations in this area, and 
  2. National Council for S&T Development - designs and proposes a strategy for S&T development to the Government and monitors its implementation.

R&D organisations within the public sector are: Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts with its 10 scientific institutes; 28 other scientific institutes; a center of scientific excellence; 30 research institutes and 65 innovative organizations. There are seven public universities comprising 89 faculties and 10 private universities numbering 60 private faculties in Serbia, granted accreditation by the Ministry for school year 2012/2013.

International scientific cooperation

In the last ten years, Serbian researchers achieved encouraging initial results in the domain of international scientific and technological cooperation. Among the programmes on which they have worked and in which they are currently engaged are the FP7 and H2020 projects, as well as COST, EUREKA, NATO Science for Peace and Security. Researches from Serbia also cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and take part in bilateral cooperation programmes. In addition to these cooperation programs, Serbia has actively participated in European and international scientific organisations such as CERN.

Open Access and Repositories

Some of the groups within Serbian research community have been aware of Open Access and its benefits, for more than a decade, since the first conference “Open Access to the Archives of Scientific and Professional Papers: From Idea to Realization” took place in Belgrade 2003. The largest number of initiatives came from the librarian community, and the majority of projects in OA are supported by EIFL-OA programme, or TEMPUS.

Open Access Policy

Some small, yet encouraging steps have been undertaken at the Policy level:

  1. Three institutions signed Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities:
      • University of Belgrade (on November 11, 2011),
      • University of Niš (on February 12, 2012) and
      • Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (on September 20, 2013)
  2. Amendments to Serbian Higher Education Law, now binding for Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), were adopted in September 2014. As of adoption of these amendments, doctoral dissertations have to be publicly available prior to the thesis defence. Universities are obliged to establish a digital repository where doctoral dissertations will be stored and they are required to submit a copy of dissertations to a central repository.

Open Access Repositories

There are 8 OA institutional repositories (the first six are listed in OpenDOAR):
  1. eLibrary;
  2. Digital Repository of the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade;
  3. Digital Repository of the Institute of Technical Sciences of SASA;
  4. CRIS UNS;
  5. Digital Repository of the University of Belgrade (PHAIDRA);
  6. doiSerbia PhD;
  7. Digital Repository of the University of Niš (PHAIDRA); and
  8. Digital Repository of the University of Kragujevac (PHAIDRA).

Open Access Journals

The MESTD subsidised more than a half of Serbian scientific journals publishers, since most of these publishers are non-for-profit organisations (scholarly associations, research institutes etc) that offer OA journals and allow self-archiving. Additionally, Government supported two major projects:

  1. SCIndeks - Serbian National Citation Index , until 2014,
  2. doiSerbia - National Library of Serbia - Digital Object Identifier Repository (listed in OpenDOAR)
The Directory of Open Access Journals lists exactly 100 Serbian journals (March, 2015)

Open Access Data Sets

The importance of preserving and re-using primary data is recognised by three groups, which gained their experiences through participation in the following projects:

  1. Support for Establishment of National/Regional Social Sciences Data, SERCIDA
  2. Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network, Serbian Public Data in the LOD cloud 
  3. Spatial data sets for Serbia 

 

Contributors Contact Details
Biljana Kosanovic
University of Belgrade - RCUB

(email)