Open Access publishing in Serbia and Western Balkan Open Science Working Group

Supporting Open Access journal editors and publishers in Serbia and participating in the Western Balkan Working Group on Open Science
SCIndeks is the central hub of the integrated system of quality-controlled scientific publishing in Serbia. The SCIndeks team developed guides and templates to help editorial boards of Serbian Open Access journals to comply with the "new" DOAJ inclusion criteria on publication policy and licensing. New functionalities in editor services were implemented and SCIndeks submitted DOAJ application forms for 49 Open Access journals. 35 of them have already been accepted by DOAJ in the past two months. OpenAIRE collaborates with SCIndeks on the non-APC FP7 Open Access Publishing Pilot project.

A comprehensive study "Open Access Journals in Serbia: Policies and Practices" by Milica Ševkušić, Zorica Janković and Aleksandra Kužet has been recently published and includes good practice advice and policy and licensing templates that could be of great help to journal editors. This study is the result of the EIFL funded project “Revisiting Open Access Journal Policies and Practices in Serbia”, implemented by the Serbian Library Consortium for Coordinated Acquisition – KoBSON. Also see Milica Ševkušić’s article “Defining the Editorial Policies of Open Access Journals in Serbia and the Role of Librarians in This Process” in ČITALIŠTE: the scientific journal on theory and practice of librarianship.

Open access, Open Research Data and Open Science are on the agenda of the Western Balkan Regional Working Group on Open Science that met in Brussels on July, 6th, 2017. It mapped the existing e-infrastructure and made plans for further development in the Western Balkan economies, in order to support Open Science e-infrastructure in the region. The meeting outlined the strategic context of Open Science in Europe and the key role of the e-infrastructure development in the European Union and the Western Balkans. OpenAIRE NOAD in Serbia Biljana Kosanovic participated in the meeting and is a member of the Western Balkan Regional Working Group on Open Science.