The Slovak Open Science Forum 2025 was held at Palffy Palace in Bratislava and hosted by the Slovak Centre of Scientific and Technical Information under UNESCO’s patronage. With over 70 attendees, the forum addressed open science trends including open access to research data, research data management, research assessment and citizen science.
Speakers and their topics included:
Ezra Clark (UNESCO): Towards equitable scholarly communication: Implementing the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science and global monitoring involving 81 countries. Key barriers highlighted include paywalls, insufficient infrastructure, capacity gaps, and APC-related costs.
Iva Melinscak Zlodi (SPARC Europe): The Role of Diamond Open Access in the Future of Scholarly Publishing and findings from the DIAMAS survey.
Jan Černý (Prague University of Economics and Business): Legal implications of AI in authorship, ownership, and global patent trends.
Hana Heringová (National Library of Technology): Persistent Identifiers and Support of their Implementation in Czechia and their legal and technical integration.
Natascha Pargas (Springer Nature): Open access publishing and workflows for Slovakia TA. The session covered three main topics: Springer Nature Transformative Agreement, Data on Slovakia's Transformative Agreement and Specific Transformative Agreement Workflows.
Katarina Skokanova (University in Nitra): Preliminary findings from a national citizen science survey, including challenges and recommendations.
Jitka Dobbersteinova (SCSTI): Growth of open access in Slovakia since 2010, infrastructure development, and transformative agreements with Springer Nature, Elsevier, Lippincott and IEEE.
A poster session featured citizen science initiatives such as Slovak Flora, Bird Hour, Living Bratislava, and PLADIAS.SK, offering attendees insights into community-led environmental research.
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