The Croatian national open access journal platform

Abstract

Until recently, Croatian scientific journals were accessible only in print form and only to a relatively small audience. A national online journals platform was therefore planned to offer publishers a simple tool for building online versions of their journals and to make them open access. The platform, named Hrčak, was launched in 2006, supported by governmental funds. It currently includes 170 open access (OA) journals. Most journals include backfiles from 2006 onwards; the average archived period is 6.3 years. 56.5% of the journals come from the fields of social sciences and humanities. Metadata from the Hrčak platform are regularly harvested by OA repositories. To increase the number of Croatian journals covered by relevant bibliographic and full‐text databases, Hrčak has forged links with Elsevier, Thomson Reuters and EBSCO. So far, the main achievements include assisting publishers in the process of electronic publishing, and improving accessibility to Croatian scientific output.

Digital repositories and scientific communication challenge

“…As a result of these sometimes unfavorable conditions, the number of digital repositories in Croatia hasn't increased in years. Nevertheless, the existing digital repositories are important for scientific communities in scientifically peripheral counties as they help in making scientific output of such countries more visible (Stojanovski, Petrak and Macan 2009;Markulin and Šember 2014).…”

Does small equal predatory? Analysis of publication charges and transparency of editorial policies in Croatian open access journals

“…Those were the main reasons for establishing the national repository of OA journals Hrčak in 2006, which currently has more than 400 Croatian scholarly, professional and popular OA journals ( 23 , 24 ). Hrčak was initially designed as a common platform for the Croatian online journals and open access was not mandatory, only recommended.…”

Publishing Scientific Journals in the Digital Age: Opportunities for Small Scholarly Journals

“…When I edited the CMJ, we did not really think about open access because the journal could afford to publish all its articles in what we called "free access" because it received substantial financial support from the Croatian Ministry of Science, like many other Croatian science journals [9]. Also, Croatia had a digital repository of full text articles in PDF (http://hrcak.hr) where all journals receiving public funding had to deposit their content [10]. In our new journal, we had no external financial support so we started as an open-access journal without article processing charges, which we introduced only when we built up the reputation of the journal [8].…”