Do open access biomedical journals benefit smaller countries? The Slovenian experience

Abstract

Scientists from smaller countries have problems gaining visibility for their research. Does open access publishing provide a solution? Slovenia is a small country with around 5000 medical doctors, 1300 dentists and 1000 pharmacists. A search of Slovenia’s Bibliographic database was carried out to identity all biomedical journals and those which are open access. Slovenia has 18 medical open access journals, but none has an impact factor and only 10 are indexed by Slovenian and international bibliographic databases. The visibility and quality of medical papers is poor. The solution might be to reduce the number of journals and encourage Slovenian scientists to publish their best articles in them. JM

Institutional repository as an important part of scholarly communication

“…For this reason, they appealed to institutions to set up IRs where scientists could store their publications based on prior agreement with the publisher and according to the Creative Commons licenses. Turk (2011) stated that 95 per cent of publishers allow this, among them internationally recognized commercial publishers, such as Elsevier, Springer, Emerald, Blackwell, Oxford University Press and others.…”

Why libraries aren’t dead: open access and the evolving liaison role

“…The 1990s were an influential time for open access (OA) and witnessed The British Medical Journal (BMJ) take on pioneer status in biomedical OA publishing [1]. It was in 1998 that The BMJ established itself as ''the first major general medical journal to provide free full text online access to its research articles, to deposit the full text in PubMed Central, and to allow authors to retain the copyright of their articles'' [2].…”