Uniwersytet Warszawski

ICM, the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modeling, University of Warsaw, is the leading scientific high-end computing centre in Poland. Beyond serving the whole academic community within the country by offering multi-level services and advanced infrastructure, ICM has developed high-rank competence in new concepts of distributed data processing and large-scale computing within grid technology paradigms. The centre has experience in the provision of large-scale Internet information and data services since 1994. The early experiences include setting up and maintaining one of the largest software repositories in Europe (SunSITE in 1995); creating the first and most popular Polish search engine in partnership with Infoseek Corp. (in 1996); and co-developing the currently most popular Polish search engine (Netsprint). ICM has also had extensive experience in Internet content replication techniques, being a founder and co-organizing a series of yearly International Web Caching and Content Replication conferences, playing an active role in TERENA's caching and indexing task forces, and establishing a countrywide caching hierarchy in Poland in 1998. Since 1995, ICM is running a multi-terabyte national scientific virtual library programme (with over 10,000 full-text articles being downloaded daily) serving hundreds of scientific and research institutions in Poland. The country-wide Internet library catalogue and IT platform are being developed as a sub-project, as well as a number of comprehensive databases of Polish academic and research journals. ICM coordinates country-wide licensing programs for access to bibliographical databases and for remote software licenses. Different databases and content repositories are being gradually integrated with the use of custom developed high-performance resource indexing broker system. ICM has unique experience in the development of heuristic text similarities analyzing algorithms, to be used in a national anti-plagiarism system developed within a separate project.

ICM as an OA Liaison Office

ICM has been active in the field of Open Access to scientific knowledge since the year 2000, when it initiated the Virtual Library of Science project. Since then, ICM has been engaged in numerous Open Access projects.

ICM works closely with key players in the fields of Open Access in science and education, both in Poland and in Europe. Since 2007 ICM has been one of the institutional partners of Creative Commons Poland, responsible for management and promotion of free copyright licenses, especially in the scientific milieu. ICM was also one of the partners of COMMUNIA, a European thematic network on the digital public domain, and of the DRIVER and DRIVER II consortia, which initialized the establishment of a pan-European network of digital scientific repositories. Now ICM participates in the OpenAIREplus and FOSTER projects. In Poland, it is a founding member of the Coalition for Open Educational Resources, which started in 2008.

Currently, ICM is engaged in various projects related to digitizing, cataloguing and providing access to Polish scientific content. It runs the Open Science Platform, which hosts the Library of Science – a service providing open access to Polish scientific journals, the CeON aggregator – aggregating the content of Polish scientific repositories, and Open the Book – a service that provides open access to digitized versions of Polish scientific books. ICM employees have expertise both in promoting Open Access issues (through conferences, public meetings, lectures and speeches) and in providing guidance for partners interested in implementing open models.

Contact persons

• Wojtek Sylwestrzak
• Marek Niezgódka
• Jakub Szprot