The world OA initiative for scientific communication in civil engineering and institutional repository as its answer – the case study of Slovenia

Abstract

Scientific communication in technics consists primarily of articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals. In our research of 2026 articles, published in JCR journals in the field of civil engineering in 2007, we found out that 21% of them are published as open accessed articles, most of them as articles archived in institutional repositories. They reached 29% of all citations in the analysed period. In accordance with these findings, in 2011 the repository at the University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Civil and Geodetic Engineering was built in open source tool ePrints. 1400 theses as well as 200 research articles have been archived in it till January 2013. The library was one of the most important stakeholders in its building as it is still today. Each of the repository unit is linked into Slovenian bibliographical information system COBISS and its cataloguing part COBIB as well as the part of high valuated research works of Slovenian researchers SICRIS. The statistics (150.000 visits from all over the world in one year) is a motivation for us to develop it further. In the near future the connection to the Slovenian Digital Library (dLib.si) shall be established, which will ensure the preservation of metadata.