Library of the largest open science collection in Poland reaches half a million scientific articles

18 November 2022 | From our Members

Over half a million articles are now available in the Library of Science, the largest open access
scientific collection in Poland, as a result of the long-term cooperation of the Open Science
Platform based at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling
of the University of Warsaw with Polish scientific publishers and indexing databases.

The Library of Science is a critical element of the Polish open science landscape. It makes full texts of articles published in Polish scientific journals and Polish scientific books available, together with rich metadata. It is free to use for everyone, without any technical barriers. Over 40% of resources are published using Creative Commons licenses that enable the free distribution and reuse of the publications.

According to Krzysztof Siewicz, the Library of Science coordinator, “Scientific journals in the Library of Science benefit from economies of scale. Our service collects over 1,600 journals and 1,200 books in one place and makes them available using internationally-recognized data exchange standards. The resources are visible to search engines and other websites, including scientific aggregators. As a result, there is a direct impact on the journal’s visibility, citations, and, consequently, its capacity to attract readers and authors“.

The new version of the service was launched last year. Over the recent 12 months, the total number of
downloads exceeded 6,5 million.

The Open Science Platform, based at the University of Warsaw, played a great role in the development of the Library of Science. The Platform develops open science infrastructure and resources, helps scientific institutions to define and implement open science policies and strategies, engages in policy advocacy, and provides open science expertise and training to the academic community in Poland.

Jakub Szprot, Head of the Open Science Platform, said that “Thanks to the Library of Science, open access to scientific publications is implemented in Poland in a way that may inspire publishers, editors, and institutions developing open access infrastructure from other countries. Gathering and making available a large part of scientific journals and books published in our country on one state-of-the-art platform opens up new possibilities for analyzing and using this content, also by machines. We are convinced that the Library of Science will be an important element of the evolving open science ecosystem that will connect publications, research data, and other digital research objects“.