Ruđer Bošković Institute adopts Open Access Mandate (Croatia)

As of April 17, 2015, all papers produced by Rudjer Boskovic Institute (RBI) researchers must be submitted to the institutional OA repository FULIR (which is OpenAIRE compliant)  upon acceptance for publication. The first institutional Open Access mandate in Croatia is based on  the Croatian Open Access Declaration (October 2012),  „Recommendation on access to and preservation of scientific information“ by the European Commission(July 2012) , and best practices of the prominent research and academic institution across the world. The Mandate was signed by the RBI general director dr. sc. Tome Antičić.

All employees of the RBI are obliged to deposit in the institutional OA repository FULIR a digital copy of all their publications, and should provide Open Access whenever possible. Publication types include journal articles, conference proceedings papers, book chapters, books and textbooks, graduation theses and dissertations, presentations and posters from conferences, presentations and materials from lectures held at RBI and other institutions, educational materials and technical reports. All publications will be stored, preserved, and made available as soon as possible.

The final version of the accepted or published paper must be deposited, and Open Access provided in the accordance with the rightholders' provisions. If the rights are partially or totally transferred to the publishers, the author is obliged to deposit a version of the paper eligible to deposit and provide Open Access to it as soon as possible. When signing a copyright transfer agreement authors should keep their right to deposit the final version of the paper into the institutional repository and provide Open Access to it. The agreements with publishers should be modified to allow compliance with the RBI Open Access mandate.

The RBI Library is responsible for the digital repository management, maintenance and development, as well as for the necessary education of RBI  employees regarding the process of deposition. Besides launching an  educational    campaign, the Library builds a website with an information toolkit  about how to comply with the Mandate. The goal is that every researcher  understand their responsibility, without doubts and misunderstanding, and to  provide researchers the knowledge necessary for negotiations with publishers.

The months ahead will bring rapid growth in the number of publicly available research publications in FULIR, as authors find their way through the maze of rights challenges, and raise their awareness  about the benefits of having their work deposited and publicly available. By maximising access to publications,  we expect to improve their visibility and usage, and aim to increase RBI’s productivity and impact and funding eligibility.

For more information, contact the OpenAIRE NOAD in Croatia: Jadranka Stojanovski.