National Open Access Desk

Slovenia is part of the European Research Area (ERA) and supports open science as chartered by the European Commission.

The national open access strategy is fully aligned with provisions on open access in Horizon 2020 which means that researchers comply with both mandates in the same way.

The national open access infrastructure consists of the national portal with harvested records (openscience.si) and repositories as well as other digital archives.

Mr Peter Sterle from the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport acts as the National Point of Reference according to the Commission Recommendation of 25 April 2018 on access to and preservation of scientific information. 

The RDA Node Slovenia was established.

The organisation of the Slovenian research environment is defined in the Research and Development Act. The Resolution on Research and Innovation Strategy of Slovenia 2011-2020 and the Research Infrastructure Roadmap 2011-2020 contain provisions on open access to publications and research data.

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

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 largest research institutes in Slovenia are Jožef Stefan Institute, Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, National Institute of Chemistry, Institute of Oncology,  Agricultural Institute of Slovenia, and National Institute of Biology.

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). 

Research libraries can offer support to researchers regarding open access to publications and research data and in building and managing certain open science infrastructures.

Regarding open access to articles, researchers comply with Article 29.2 of the H2020 grant agreement by depositing peer-reviewed publications into the Slovenian OpenAIRE compatible repositories.

The Open Science Slovenia portal harvests metadata from Slovenian repositories and other archives for scientific publications and research data which enables federated search at the portal.

Slovenia takes part in the OpenAIRE-Advance project (the National Open Access Desk at the University of Ljubljana).

The only data centre in Slovenia is Social Science Data Archives (member of CESSDA ERIC), which also coordinates the RDA Node Slovenia. 

CLARIN.SI is the research infrastructure for Slovenian language sources and technologies.

SI-DIH DARIAH is Slovenian digital humanities research infrastructure. Its search engine enables searching of research data in different repositories and archives of institutions and societies from the humanities and the arts.

The ELIXIR Slovenia Node provides data, computing, tools, and training for the life sciences.

A complete list of publicly funded research infrastructures is available in the Research Infrastructure Roadmap 2011-2020.

SLING is a Slovenian national supercomputing network that provides access to cluster-based Slovenian and international computing and storage capacities.

HPC-RIVR (High Performance Computing – Research Infrastructure Eastern Region) project has established a national supercomputing centre. Supercomputer VEGA is part of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking.

Research datasets can be deposited into the Social Science Data Archives and CLARIN repositories. Data archives are being built by the national supercomputing centre HPC RIVR and ELIXIR Slovenia, which are in collaboration. HPC RIVR centre is planning to use EUDAT Collaborative Data Infrastructure services and will also offer preservation of research datasets.

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) and the action plan in May 2017.

Mr Peter Sterle from the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport acts as the national EOSC contact point.

University of Maribor Library and Academic and Research Network of Slovenia (ARNES) are partners in the NI4OS-Europe project (National Initiatives for Open Science in Europe).

Funder policies are determined by the National Strategy of Open Access to Scientific Publications and Research Data in Slovenia 2015-2020. Each beneficiary has to ensure open access to all peer-reviewed scientific publications that refer to the results from the nationally funded research. Before the adoption of the open research data mandate, a national pilot programme Open Access to Research Data will be carried out.

Slovenian Research Agency signed Plan S in September 2018 and the DORA Declaration in July 2019.

Slovenian research performing organizations have not yet adopted the open science policies.

The University of Ljubljana included a provision on designing and implementing the education and research according to the principles of open science in the Statutes of the University (Article 6 in Chapter II. on the autonomy of the university; came into force on 11 February 2017).

The University of Maribor has signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities in March 2014 and DORA - the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment - in June 2019.