Toward a New World in Scholarly Communication: The 9th PUBMET2022 Conference on Scholarly Communication in the Context of Open Science

Open access has emerged from the need to make scholarly communication freely available to the scientific community and not hidden behind a paywall. One significant catalyst of the initiative was Plan S, which mandates open access to publications resulting from projects funded by major European financial institutions within cOAlition S [1]. Although initiatives promoting open access have increased the accessibility of scientific literature, progress in scientific communication as a whole has been limited, with most other research outputs remaining inaccessible. The European Union Council has called on member states to support policies towards a non-profit, open access scholarly publishing model, encouraging the development of national open access policies which will promote equitable and sustainable scholarly publishing under open licences and apply FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reproducible) principles to research data [2]. The development of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) created a perfect environment for hosting and processing research data, where researchers can publish, find, and re-use data, tools, and services [3]. Open science initiatives also focus on involving the public in scientific processes through citizen science, reforming evaluation and reward systems, and establishing appropriate research infrastructures and related services. Sharing all outputs in the earliest stages of research, including research data, software, protocols, methods, etc., is the basis for the accelerated development of responsible science.

Recognizing the importance of open access early on, Croatia joined the initiative by developing the freely accessible Croatian scientific bibliography, CROSBI, in 1997, followed by several other projects, including the establishment of the HRČAK repository, which houses more than 450 Croatian OA journals, with over 90% in diamond open access, and the DABAR national infrastructure with over 120 institutional repositories [4]. Although national open science policies have not yet been adopted, the Croatian Open Science Cloud Initiative (HR-OOZ) was launched as a part of EOSC in 2021 to develop a modern scholarly system in Croatia based on open science that aligns with European research standards and initiatives [5]. Nine years ago, we launched an international conference on scholarly communication in the context of open science called PUBMET, which has continued to be held at the University of Zadar, becoming one of the major conferences on open acess that brings together researchers, editors, publishers, librarians, policymakers, experts in scientific communication, and educators.

The PUBMET2022 conference1 gathered 120 in-person and 300 online participants over the course of three days and provided a platform for the discussion of the most current topics in open science and the trends shaping the development of scientific communication. The conference featured six invited lectures, sixteen short talks, ten workshops, a poster session, and three panel discussions on various topics related to open science. From the conference, ten submissions were carefully selected and peer reviewed for publication in this Special Issue of Publications. They cover various topics, such as the landscape of scholarly book publishing, crowdfunding initiatives for publishing open access monographs by European universities, the role of universities and public libraries in promoting citizen science in Europe, open tools (for self-archiving and assessing the potential of green open access, automatic XML extraction, and e-book formatting), the promotion of open science within NI4OS-Europe and NOSCIs initiatives, the GoTriple open science platform for social sciences and humanities, the promotion of openness and transparency guidelines across journals, and mechanisms of information diffusion within academic institutions using the information space model.

These papers provide valuable insight into the initiatives and tools that promote open science, which will help readers to understand the complexity of open access and its wide impact on different aspects, not only on the openess of research data and tools, but also on the increase in the quality and transparency of scientific communication, the development of governmental policies, the inclusion of the community, and the promotion of equity, diversity and sustainability. The information presented in this Special Issue will be also of great help to institutions, organizations and policy makers, giving them an overview of successfully implemented guidelines, platforms, and tools for promoting open science, which can be of use in the development of their own open science infrastructure and national open access policies.