OA in Slovenia

Written on Feb 23, 2010.

The National Research Environment

The organization of the Slovenian research environment is defined in the Research and Development Act, which also specifies how research and development policies are implemented and how research is funded from the government funds and other sources (European programmes and frameworks, local communities, and business enterprises). Research and development activities are carried out by the research performing institutions through programmes and projects, and by private researchers through projects. The Research and Development Act states that results of research and development activities, financed from the government funds, should be made publicly available with the only limitations being those set by the regulations on intellectual property, authors’ rights and personal data.

The Resolution on Research and Innovation Strategy of Slovenia 2011-2020 determines Open Access to raw research data from publicly financed research and preparation of an action plan till the year 2014 as a basis for a national Open Research Data policy.

The Research Infrastructures Roadmap 2011-2020 envisages the international cooperation of Slovenia in ESS, DARIAH and CESSDA projects. National repositories for scientific publications and for raw research data are planned and are to be connected to the national Current Research Information System (SICRIS). Deposit of research publications and raw data is to be made mandatory when the infrastructure is established. Building of an open social sciences and humanities research infrastructure is also anticipated.

Research and development activities are carried out at approximately 400 research institutions. There are three public universities in Slovenia: the University of Ljubljana, the University of Maribor, and the University of Primorska. The largest among the private academic institutions is the University of Nova Gorica. The four universities form the Rectors’ Conference of the Republic of Slovenia. The largest research institutes in Slovenia are the Jožef Stefan Institute, the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the National Institute of Chemistry, the Institute of Oncology, the Agricultural Institute of Slovenia, and the National Institute of Biology. 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 the Slovenian Current Research Information System SICRIS (personal bibliographies of researchers are also used for research evaluation).

More information on the national research environment is available at Research and Innovation Observatory (RIO) - Slovenia.

Major Research Funders

Major funders of research are the Slovenian Research Agency and the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport.

EC Research Funding

In 2014, Slovenia spent 2.39 % of its gross domestic product to finance research and development activities. In the same year the total funding for R &D expenditure from abroad amounted to 82.48 million EUR, out of this 38.19 million EUR from the European Commission.

Open Access Situation

The Government of the Republic of Slovenia adopted the National Strategy of Open Access to Scientific Publications and Research Data in Slovenia 2015-2020 in September 2015 (ROARMAP record).

Slovenian research performing organizations have not yet adopted the Open Access policies.

Mrs Petra Tramte from the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport was nominated as the National Point of Reference in accordance with the Commission Recommendation of 17. 7. 2012 on access to and preservation of scientific information. She also coordinates the activities of the working group on open access, nominated by the Minister.

Information on Open Access in Slovenian language is available through the national portal Open Access Slovenia. 45 Slovenian scientific journals are indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. The electronic versions of all publicly co-financed Slovenian journals (138 titles) and final reports of research projects, financed by the Slovenian Research Agency, must be deposited into the Digital Library of Slovenia. Many of the scientific journals use Open Journal Systems for managing the publication process. The country does not have a national portal for the Open Access journals or for the Open Access monographs.

The Open Science Slovenia portal was established that harvests metadata from Slovenian repositories and other archives for scientific publications and research data which enables joint display and federated search at the portal. Slovenian repositories for the research outcomes (Digital Library of the University of Maribor, Repository of the University of Ljubljana, Repository of the University of Primorska, Repository of the University of Nova Gorica, Digital Repository of the Research Organizations of Slovenia) enable collection, storage and making scientific publications available to the public. Repositories are compatible with the OpenAIRE Guidelines and are included into the OpenAIRE portal. Slovenia takes part in the OpenAIRE2020 project (the National Open Access Desk at the University of Ljubljana). Social Science Data Archives, a member of CESSDA, maintained by the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Ljubljana, is collecting raw research data from the social sciences research. CLARIN.SI is the Slovenian research infrastructure for language sources and technologies. SI-DIH DARIAH search engine enables search for research data in different repositories and archives of institutions and societies from the humanities and the arts.

The conference Open Science in the European Research Area was organized by the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport and the University of Ljubljana on 17 November 2016. A short report is published at the OpenAIRE blog.