Revisiting open access journal policies and practices in Serbia

Posted: April 8, 2016

EIFL is delighted to announce a new 10-month project in Serbia, titled ‘Revisiting open access journal policies and practices in Serbia’, with the Serbian Library Consortium for Coordinated Acquisition (KoBSON - EIFL’s partner consortium in Serbia) and the National Library of Serbia.

The project will improve visibility of Serbian OA journals, and enhance their attractiveness for researchers – both readers and authors.

Scholarly OA journals in Serbia are mostly subsidized by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development and/or supported by membership fees or donations to scholarly societies. Therefore, most journals do not charge article processing charges (APCs).

Over the past decade, much has been done to improve the quality and visibility of OA journals in Serbia, primarily through DOISerbia and SCIndeks. However, many OA journals in Serbia have not truly made the transition towards e-publishing and global visibility. Many journals are merely archives of PDF files, and some still make the e-version available only after the print version has been released.

PROJECT TO IDENTIFY AND OVERCOME PROBLEMS

The main objective of the project is to identify problems and to offer solutions through guidelines and training.

Project activities will include:

Conducting a survey to identify OA journal policies and practices;
Developing model policies for scholarly OA journals and encouraging OA journals to adopt them;
Upgrading the DOISerbia platform to enable publishers to add journal policies, ethical statements and other relevant documents and materials (at present, only basic information, papers, issues and volumes are available).
Developing guidelines and making them available to the publishers / editorial staff of OA journals; and
Organizing workshops for the editorial staff of Serbian OA journals.

WORKING WITH KEY INSTITUTIONS

The project partners include:

The Institute of Biological Research Siniša Stanković, University of Belgrade, one of the publishers of the journal Archives of Biological Sciences, which contributed significantly to improving publishing practices and in 2015 switched to Open Journal Systems.
The Serbian Chemical Society, publisher of the Journal of the Serbian Chemical Society, which has also moved to Open Journal Systems.
The University of Niš, publisher of 13 journals within the Facta Universitatis series, all of which use Open Journal Systems as their publishing platform.

RESULTS AND ACHIEVEMENTS

The project will result in:

Publication of a report describing and explaining policies and practices of scholarly OA journals in Serbia;
Improved OA policies;
Improved editorial policies;
Streamlined peer review processes;
Optimized journal websites; and
A body of guidelines for existing and new scholarly OA journals.

FIND OUT MORE

Read the EIFL blog, Open Access in Serbia, in which Milica Ševkušić, EIFL OA Country Coordinator in Serbia, shares achievements in promoting OA. Ševkušić will coordinate the new ‘Revisiting open access journal policies and practices in Serbia’ project.