Scientific communication has changed little from the first printed versions of scientific journals in the mid-17th century to the emergence of electronic forms at the end of the 20th century. Authors report the results of research, most of it funded by their institutions or obtained through national or international calls for proposals, in articles that are reviewed by their peers (peer reviewers). When an article is accepted for publication, they transfer their material copyright to the publisher, who provides access to the research results on payment of a subscription to the journal and restricts the use of figures, graphs and other parts of the publication in subsequent publications with the publisher's consent. Most researchers are employed by public institutions, which are obliged to pay subscription fees to give their researchers access to the latest science to support quality research.

Dissatisfaction with the restriction of access to the results of publicly funded research through subscriptions has been compounded by spiralling prices of scientific journalswhich, in a difficult financial climate, requires an increasing share of the resources of research institutions in the developed world, further widening the gap in access to scientific information worldwide.

In the traditional system of scientific communication, the research data only selectively available, partly because of the desire of data creators to increase their competitiveness in the publication market by monopolising them.

The definitions most commonly used to describe the characteristics of open access to scientific publications are those set out in Budapest and  Bethesda Declarations. The basic principle of Open Access is to make the results of publicly funded research immediately available on the World Wide Web, without subscription or copyright restrictions.

Open Access publication (libre open access) meets the following criteria:

1. the author and the owner of the material copyright grant to all users worldwide a free, irrevocable and perpetual right of access to the publication and to reproduce, use, distribute, transmit and publicly display the work, to produce and distribute derivative works in any digital medium for any responsible purpose (e.g. indicate the permitted use by means of copyright model licences Creative Commons) and allow users to make a small number of printouts for their own use,

1. the complete publication and all supplementary material, including the licence referred to in the preceding point, shall be immediately after publication, deposited in at least one Internet repository, allowing free access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability and permanent preservation. At the University of Maribor, we recommend that you use the institutional repository to submit your works DKUM.

We must draw attention to the difference between open access and free access to publications:

• free access (gratis or free open access): the full text of the article is freely available on the World Wide Web, and the content is protected by the copyright provisions of subscription-based scientific journals (the author transfers the material copyright to the publisher). Although unpaid by the end-user, in most cases free access is paid for, since in reality the institutions pay for it,

• Open Access (libre open access): the full text of the article is freely available online. The author retains the material copyright and has granted permission to the publisher for publication in an open access scientific journal (licence to publish). Permitted and unauthorised uses of the article are indicated, for example, by licences Creative Commons. Licences may be set by the author for a single article, or by the journal's editorial board and apply to all articles published in the journal.

Open access to the results of publicly funded research in the form of publications and data is part of open science. It is rapidly gaining ground in the form of scientific articles and published lectures.

The field of open access scientific monographs is developing more slowly.

There are basically four types of open access provision:

• Open Access Gold: Publishing in open access journals is referred to as gold open access. Open access journals provide access to articles without a subscription fee and use a copyright model where the author retains the material copyright (e.g. Creative Commons licences). Publication can be free of charge to the author or by paying an article processing charge (APC).

• Open Access Gold in hybrid journals (Hybrid open access journals, which are subscription-based scholarly journals in electronic format that allow authors to make individual articles immediately open or freely available upon payment of an APC (the author is usually funded by his or her institution or the funder of the research). An author may retain the material copyright for his or her immediately open access article (e.g. marked with a Creative Commons licence) in an otherwise subscription-based scholarly journal where the authors of the other subscription-based articles have assigned the material copyright to the publishing house.

• Green open access or self-archiving: Green open access (GOA) refers to the deposit of an author's final peer-reviewed version of an article (preprint - postprint) accepted for publication in a subscription scientific journal, or a not yet peer-reviewed version of an article (preprint - submitted article for publication) in an institutional repository. If the author has transferred the material copyright to the publisher for publication in a subscription scientific journal, the publisher must allow the author to deposit the peer-reviewed or non-peer-reviewed article in the repository. The policies of publishers of subscription scientific journals on repository storage are collected on the SHERPA/RoMEO website. 

• Open Monographs: The field of open access scientific monographs is developing more slowly than open journal publishing and repository storage. The Open Access Publishing in European Networks (OAPEN) project is the start of a European infrastructure for open access to scholarly monographs in the humanities and social sciences.

• And recently, there has also been talk of Diamond Open Access, which provides open access publishing without payment of APCs.

More on Open Access journals and OpenUp

Finding quality open access resources

Scientific works in the open access constitute a high-quality and widely accessible source of scientific information. However, in the flood of information, it is necessary to assess its relevance and credibility. In this context, misleading online services and content are common. For more information, see the lecture by M. Pusnik: Untrustworthy publishing practices and on the research guide Unfair publishing practices.

One of the most important measures of the relevance of information is based on the assessment of the platform where the information was obtained. If it is an article from a scientific journal, we can easily check whether it is a credible source of information (e.g. checking which databases the journal is indexed in, whether the journal is labelled with a credible impact factor (e.g. Impact Factor, SNIP, etc.), whether the journal has a credible impact factor (e.g. Impact Factor, SNIP, etc.), whether the journal has a credible impact factor (e.g.For gold journals that have only been published for a short period of time, we pay particular attention to the publisher.

A simple approach to finding good quality open access information sources is to use search engines or open access tools to retrieve scientific information, for example  CORE (COnnecting REpositories), BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) or Unpaywall. These tools and some other providers allow you to install specific browser extensions to check the open accessibility of displayed documents and content on an ongoing basis.

They have been in use for some time Unpaywall and EndNote Click (formerly Kopernio) Chrome extension.

CORE Discovery is based on CORE, the largest current search engine for open content documents, and also provides access to content from other services outside CORE. It is the only tool that can locate documents with "unknown" DOIs or documents that have no DOI identifier at all. In addition, it is also available as a repository plugin - it adds links to open/free access versions of the document to the metadata about the material (more at https://core.ac.uk/services/discovery/).

There are also databases that allow you to search exclusively for gold journals. The best known database of this kind is Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Gold journals indexed in DOAJ meet strict criteria for inclusion in the collection.

Similarly, there are databases for searching open access scientific monographs, for example Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), which contains information on scientific monographs published by universities and scientific publishers.

Determining the quality of information retrieved from repositories is usually a bit more challenging. Trustworthy repositories can be found in repository directories such as Directory of Open Access Repositories (OpenDOAR)  or Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR). Trusted Slovenian repositories are networked in the framework of the National Open Science Portal.

Researchers very often use peer-to-peer sharing or sharing via academic social networks and collaboration platforms, such as Academia, ResearchGate, Mendeley, figshare. This should be done using options that are in line with publishers' policies. Useful information and practical tools for sharing articles quickly and easily can be found at How can I share it. In any case, it is advisable to check the policy of the individual publisher in cases where it is unclear.

Repositories

Repositories enable the archiving, preservation and access to digital forms of scholarly works, such as scientific articles, monographs, theses, research data, software and so on. 

Repositories can be organised at the level of research institutions, at national level, at the level of individual scientific fields and in other ways.

In the past, repositories mainly contained scientific articles, monographs and theses, but more and more repositories are now also offering the possibility to store research data. These so-called data repositories are often organised by scientific field. 

In 2013, Slovenian universities, co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport, set up the National Open Science Portal , which brings together most Slovenian repositories, including Digital Library of the University of Maribor (DKUM), Repository of the University of Ljubljana (RUL) and Repository of the University of Primorska (RUP). The same software platform was later used to create Digital Repository of Research Organisations of Slovenia (DiRROS) and Repository of Independent Higher and Post-Secondary Education Organisations (ReVIS).

Slovenia also has some sectoral repositories. The best known are: Archive of Social Science Data (ADP), Clarin.si (language resources and technologies) Sistory (history of Slovenia) and  Dariah-SI (digital humanities).  

Learn more about publishing scientific articles in repositories.

Open Access licences

Appropriate licences allow authors - the licensors - to retain copyright while allowing at least non-commercial copying, distribution and fair use of the author's work.

Licences are used by licensors to define permission for a chosen way of using a scientific work. In most cases, open publications use the Creative Commons (CC) licence, which sets out a number of conditions, such as attribution, the right to adapt and commercially exploit, sharing conditions, and so on.

 Learn more about Creative Commons licences https://creativecommons.org/licenses/?lang=sl

 Licence selector: https://creativecommons.si/deli

Types of licences

CC BY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP

Users are allowed to reproduce, distribute, lease, publicly perform and adapt the copyright work for any purpose, including commercial purposes, provided that they credit the author of the original work.

CC BY-SA

ATTRIBUTION - SHARING ON EQUAL TERMS

Users are allowed to reproduce, distribute, lease, publicly perform and adapt the original or derivative work for any purpose, including commercial purposes, provided that they credit the author of the work and distribute the original or derivative work under the same conditions.

CC BY-ND

ATTRIBUTION OF AUTHORSHIP - WITHOUT ALTERATIONS

Users are allowed to reproduce, distribute, rent and publicly perform the original work for any purpose, including commercial purposes, provided that they credit the author of the original work and do not modify the work.

CC BY-NC

ATTRIBUTION - NON-COMMERCIAL

Users are allowed to reproduce, distribute, lease, publicly perform and adapt the original or derivative work, but only for non-commercial purposes and on condition that they credit the author of the work.

CC BY-NC-SA

ATTRIBUTION - NON-COMMERCIAL - SHARING ON EQUAL TERMS

Users are allowed to reproduce, distribute, lease, publicly perform and adapt the original or derivative work, but only for non-commercial purposes, provided that they credit the author of the work and distribute the original or derivative work under the same conditions.

CC BY-NC-ND

ATTRIBUTION - NON-COMMERCIAL - NO MODIFICATIONS

Users are allowed to reproduce, distribute, rent and publicly display the original work, but only for non-commercial purposes, provided that they credit the author of the original work and do not modify it.

CC0

PUBLIC DOMAIN

The author puts his or her work in the public domain, thereby waiving all rights that may be waived. Users are allowed to reproduce, distribute, rent, publicly perform and adapt the work for any purpose, including commercial purposes, without having to credit the author of the original work.