Open Access at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic

The introduction of this paper briefly explains the Open Access (OA) policy (with a short history) of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic (ASCR), including basic principles of OA publishing at the ASCR, which is a signatory of the Berlin Declaration of 2008. In 2009, the Academy of Sciences adopted the OA policy and this policy applies to all scholarly and scientific articles written by scientists of the Academy, except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy. The section which follows deals with the active support of ”Gold“ Open Access publishing, i.e., a fund created in 2010 for OA publishing the work of authors at the Academy of Sciences and other work performed by the Library and Academy of Sciences in this area. The last section covers the activities of the ASCR’s Library pertaining to institutional repository and storage and also copyright laws and negotiations with publishers. The repository was created as an extension of the Automatic System of Publication Data Evidence (ASEP) database system which is used for archiving publication outputs of ASCR Institutes. The Academy’s Library has coordinated data collecting of publications and results of basic research in ASCR since 1993. On January 2, 2012, the ASEP database became the Institutional Repository of the ASCR. It facilitates adding full texts to all bibliographic records to the database while respecting the publishers’ policy. Of 54 institutes affiliated with the Academy of Sciences, during 2012 26 signed a contract to archive full texts in the repository. After one year, nearly 3,000 full texts are available.