Presentation at Open Science and Research Forum in Helsinki on 25th November 2014. Event website: http://web.csc.fi/csc/kurssit/arkisto/openscienceforum

1. Situation and Plans on Fostering
Open Science in Poland
Dr. Łukasz Bolikowski
Centre for Open Science, ICM, University of Warsaw
Open Science and Research Forum, 25th November 2014

2. Basic facts about (science in) Poland
38.5 million citizens; member of the EU
76 thousand scientific FTEs
100 public higher education institutions
(the oldest one est. 1364)
300 non-public higher education institutions
(the oldest one est. 1991)
200 public research institutes
2000 Polish peer-reviewed journals
1.5 billion e science budget
two major research funding agencies
(one for basic research, one for applied research)

3. Basic facts about ICM
Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computa-tional
Modelling (ICM) at University of Warsaw is a su-percomputing
and research data centre.
(3rd and 4th paradigm)
Centre for Open Science at ICM aims at understanding
and improving scholarly communication. You may know
us via OpenAIRE, FOSTER, RDA WGs, or other initiatives.
(events, reports, analyses, projects, scholarly comm. platforms, open software)

4. Sources
This presentation is primarily based on two sources:
1 Current situation is described based on a comprehen-sive
report “Open Science in Poland 2014. Diagnosis.”
(in Polish, translation to English in progress)
2 Plans are described based on an interview with
Prof. Włodzisław Duch, Deputy Minister of Science
and Higher Education
(in Polish)

5. Legal context of open science in Poland
Until recently, adoption of an open science culture in Poland used to be a bottom-up
process, driven by researchers and activists.
There haven’t been much regulations, neither “carrots” nor “sticks”.
Recently, policy-makers have started taking important steps towards open science.

6. Legal context of open science in Poland
Lack of “sticks” – open access mandates
Virtually no open access mandates in Polish research institutions and research
funding agencies. Two exceptions: Silesian University of Technology (university
level) and ICM, University of Warsaw (department level).
None of the Polish repositories listed in ROARMAP1 has an open access mandate
in a strict sense: while deposition in the repositories is mandatory, providing open
access to full-texts is voluntary.
No open research data mandates.
1Registry of Open Access Repositories Mandatory Archiving Policies

7. Legal context of open science in Poland
Lack of “carrots” – metrics rewarding open science practices
Research funding agencies do not reward open science practices.
Evaluation of research institutions by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education
(which affects distribution of funding) does not extend to their “openness”.
Research funding agencies, research institutions and the Ministry use conservative
metrics, based on Impact Factor (e.g. asking about “sum IF” in grant applications,
DSc applications). As a consequence, in a poll of 3119 Polish scientists, 81.3%
declared that IF is an “important” or “very important” criterion in choosing a pub-lication
venue.
This, arguably, creates disincentives to experimenting with alternative, more open
models of scholarly communication.

8. Legal context of open science in Poland
European regulations
As a member of the EU and a beneficiary of H2020, EU-wide
policies apply:
recommendation on access to and preservation
of scientific information (2012/417/EU);
H2020 mandate of open access to all funded publications;
H2020 open research data pilots.

9. Legal context of open science in Poland
Plans
Recently, an advisory group to the Ministry of Science and Higher Education has
started working on a national strategy for open access to research content (in
line with the 2012/417/EU recommendation). The group makes extensive use of an
expert report (commissioned by the Ministry and written by ICM) on international
good practices in open access to research and educational content.

10. Legal context of open science in Poland
Plans
In 2013, the heads of the Conference of Rectors of Academic Schools in Poland
and Polish Academy of Sciences have issued a joint statement on open access to
research publications and educational content. Highlights:
OA as the primary model of sharing research publications;
in order to succeed, OA needs to be included in assessments and metrics;
recommending depositing in OA repositories + granting non-exclusive
licenses to publishers.

11. Open access e-infrastructures in Poland
Institutional repositories
As of April 2014, 22 institutional repositories in Poland:
DSpace is the most popular software;
18 repositories provide open access to majority of their resources;
6 repositories are compliant with OpenAIRE on a basic level.

12. Open access e-infrastructures in Poland
Research data repositories
Figshare is popular among Polish researchers. Poland
ranks 4th in Figshare’s usage by country.
Trace amounts of research data in Polish institutional
repositories.
Two research data repositories under construction at ICM.
(one for small data, one for big data)

13. Open access e-infrastructures in Poland
OpenAIRE
ICM is co-developing the Open Access Infrastructure for Re-search
in Europe (OpenAIRE, funded by FP7 and H2020).
We are responsible for:
hosting and maintenance of the infrastructure
(OpenAIRE servers are physically located in Warsaw)
text and data mining of OpenAIRE content
community outreach in Poland
(as a National Open Access Desk)

14. Polish publishers vs. open access
Book publishers are sceptical, afraid that open access will hurt their revenues.
Journal publishers, on the other hand, embrace open access.
Market: a lot of small publishers dependent on public funding.
Trying to reach as many readers as they can.
49.2% of Polish academic journals in open access without embargo.
Vast majority of journals in gratis OA, only 1.35% in libre OA.

15. Thank you for your attention. Contact me!
linkedin.com/in/bolikowski
twitter.com/bolikowski
lukasz.bolikowski@icm.edu.pl
+48 22 8749419

16. License
c 2014 ICM, University of Warsaw. Some rights reserved. This presentation is available under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license. Materials from the following
sources were used:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EU-Poland.svg (p. 2, CC BY-SA 3.0)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/kewl/8475764430 (p. 3, CC BY 2.0)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/iwannt/8596885627 (p. 3, CC BY 2.0)
http://pon.edu.pl/index.php/nasze-publikacje?pubid=13 (p. 4, CC BY 3.0 PL)
http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.97662 (p. 12, CC BY 3.0)