Slovenian openscience infrastructure

In 2013, Slovenian universities, with co-funding from the European Regional Development Fund and the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport, launched a national Open Science Portal and repositories for open access to researchers' theses and research results. Bilingual web and mobile interfaces, along with a recommendation system, are available to users worldwide. This infrastructure was complemented in 2014-2022 by repositories for independent research organisations and other higher education institutions, a national server for assigning persistent identifiers and a wholesale data repository.  We have also included several other providers of research results. The repositories and the national Open Science portal make the research results of Slovenian research organisations accessible to researchers, students, businesses, and other users worldwide. Researchers have an infrastructure that enables them to comply with the provisions on mandatory open access to publicly funded research results.

The Slovenian open-access infrastructure consists of Slovenian universities’ repositories (a repository of the University of Ljubljana, a Digital library of the University of Maribor, a Repository of the University of Primorska, and a Repository of the University of Nova Gorica), a Repository for research organizations (DIRROS), the Repository for standalone faculties which are not part of universities (REVIS) and a national portal that aggregates content from the repositories and other Slovenian archives (Digital library of Slovenia (dLib.si), VideoLectures.NET, Digital library of Ministry of Defence (DKMORS), Social Science data archive (SSDA), CLARIN.si and repositories of Slovenian open access publishers of journals and monographs). The national portal provides a common search engine, a recommender system of similar publications, and text-matching software. It is also used for deduplication of publications, normalisation of authors of publications, and distribution of content and metadata to other repositories if authors are from different institutions. The repositories are connected to the national bibliographic system COBISS.SI and the national current research information system SICRIS. Aggregated data from repositories enable funders to check the actual openness of scientific publications, research data, and other research results. Metadata from repositories is harvested from OpenAire, Google Scholar, Google dataset search, Core, from the European portal for doctoral theses DART-Europe, and other directories, aggregators, and search engines. The Slovenian open-access infrastructure has a national service for assigning persistent identifiers to digital objects and a big data archive for the storage of big data sets from repositories. The digital objects from the national infrastructure are used in the Slovenian national supercomputing network SLING, the national COVID-19 data portal, and the European COVID-19 data portal. The Academic and Research Network of Slovenia (ARNES) enable us to use a backbone network based on broadband fibre-optic links. They also host DIRROS and REVIS repositories on their server infrastructure. We also use their disk storage to store backups. The Institute of Information Sciences from Maribor provides us with the use of the VEGA supercomputer and a big data archive from which users can process data on the Slovenian National Supercomputing Network (SLING) and other supercomputers in Europe. The infrastructure enables Slovenia to implement the policy of open access to the results of nationally funded research, as expected of the EU Member States participating in the ERA.

Web links:

National portal: http://www.openscience.si/

Description of Slovenian open-access infrastructure: https://openscience.si/OProjektu.aspx

Slovenian openscience monitor: https://monitor.openscience.si/

Portal of Slovenian Scientific Journals and Monographs: https://revije.openscience.si/about

Research Data Management Plan Assistant Tool: https://nrrp.openscience.si/