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Frequently asked questions

On this page we have prepared a summary of answers to basic questions about Open Access (OA) at BUT and OA in general. Questions and answers will gradually increase. If you have any questions, please ask via contact form.

1. Is Green Open Access circumvention of peer-review evaluation?

No, it isn’t, it is just the opposite. Most OA journals has established a certain type of peer-review process and its presence may help distinguish valuable journal from fraudulent or bad journals. Many OA journals are also being evaluated in databases Web of Science and Scopus, where they could not get without the review process.

As the peer-review process is one of the pillars of scientific publishing, OA respects its principles. However, it is trying to come up with some innovations that are allowed by modern information infrastructure. One of the proposals is e.g. an open review process, when the reviewer is not only a scientist, but the reviewer can be anyone who has the time, desire and knowledge to express his opinion on the document. Such proceedings are going on the publisher website, discussion forums, wiki pages or other designated areas.

Another trend within the review process is the review process within the so-called „megajournals“. Reviewer only evaluates how the article is written from the professional side of view to make sure there are no logical or factual errors. Whether the content of the article is beneficial for the field or not, must be assessed by the readers of the magazine. The publishers try to avoid frequent criticisms of the review process, kwhere one scientist may dismiss a revolutionary idea that is not understandable and attractive for him, while for others it could be a great discovery. Such a review process has, for example, PlosOne magazine (http://www.plosone.org/static/publish).

Articles stored in the repository and made available through the green open access have already been published in a peer-reviewed magazine and thus undergone the process. Green road is thus only the next possibility of publishing and making the document open accessible.

2. Why did Open Access come into existence?

A very simplified answer to the question is "because of the internet." New possibilities of the information society and the dissemination of information that have their roots in open source software, receive a new dimension with the development of the Internet. Normal communication style is gradually changing and also the scientific communication is changing. A new trend is just OA, which does not reshape the scientific communication completely, but makes it more suitable to the modern information age. Another important factor that supported the development of OA, is the social aspect of scientific publishing. It emphasizes that the majority of scientific research is funded from public sources and therefore science (at least the public) should be available to anyone. The third important factor is the economic aspect, when especially the library community point out the high increase of prices of publications of scientific character, that is becoming untenable. Interesting article on the topic can be found at this link: http://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/1.12676!/menu/main/topColumns/topLeftColumn/pdf/495426a.pdf

3. What are the benefits of Open Access?

Easier access to scientific articles
More readers
Higher probability of referencing
Faster sharing of information
Prevention of plagiarism
Reducing expenditures on the purchase of professional sources
Easier handling of the publications
Long-term preservation of documents in repositories

4. How can BUT assist authors in Open Access?

By signing the Berlin Declaration in 2013 Brno University of Technology publicly espoused the OA movement. In this context, the Declaration of Open Access institutional policy at BUT (as Rector's decision No.21 / 2014) was also issued.

Activities associated with OA are coordinated by the BUT Central Library which is developing support mechanisms and cooperation with other departments of the university. The main activities of the CL community for OA community at University include:

1) Administration of the OA Fund, where it is possible to obtain financial support for the publication in the Gold OA. More information here: https://www.vutbr.cz/en/libraries/openaccess/funds

2) Managing the BUT Digital Library, where you can publish your article in Green OA. More information here: https://www.vutbr.cz/en/libraries/digital-library/how-to-publish

3) Management of Open Access Portal, where it is possible to obtain more general information on OA. More information here: https://www.vutbr.cz/openaccess

If you have any questions, you can contact the staff of the Central Library via the contact form available here:: http://formulare.lib.vutbr.cz/dotazy/open-access/

5. Where to ask if I would like to publish my article in the BUT Digital Library?

Information on how to proceed in case of publishing your article in the BUT Digital Library can be found on the Portal Libraries in the section Digital library: How to publish an article in BUT Digital Library (https://www.vutbr.cz/en/libraries/digital-library/how-to-publish).

If you have any questions, please contact us via the contact form on the Open Access Portal (www.vutbr.cz/openaccess)

6. How can I publish article in Open Access journal?

The Publication process in open access journals is identical with the publishing process in classic journals. The author sends the article to the review process; editors will evaluate the article and then recommend or not recommend it for publication.

Because the published articles in Open Access journals are freely available on the Internet, the cost of running of the publishing house must be sought elsewhere. Some institutional OA journals such costs are charged to the budget of the institution or other sources, other journals ask authors to cover the publication fee.

For the payment of a fee you can get funding from various grants and projects under which you publish the article. You can also obtain grants on BUT. To get more information about the grants, please visit: https://www.vutbr.cz/en/libraries/openaccess/funds

List of Open Access Journals evaluated according to the Methodology of evaluating results of research organizations and results of completed programs (valid for the years 2013 to 2015) can be found at: http://1drv.ms/1uy1Xp6

Další You can find Open Access journals in the database Directory of Open Access Journals - http://doaj.org/

7. Who will answer my questions regarding Open Access? Whom should I contact?

Basic information about OA at BUT can be found on the Open Access Portal: www.vutbr.cz/openaccess. The department responsible for developing ideas of OA at BUT is the BUT Central Library based on the BUT Rectorate. You can use the contact form to arrange a personal meeting.

Please do not hesitate to contact us with any questions, comments or suggestions for improvement. OA is a novelty in the world of academic publishing and its implementation is a constant process.

8. Who is responsible for managing the BUT Digital Library?

BUT Digital library, the institutional repository which collects, among other things published by the university staff, is managed by BUT the Central Library in collaboration with the Centre for Computing and Information Services (CVIS).

For more information visit the library portal https://www.vutbr.cz/en/libraries/digital-library.If you have any question please use the contact form at: http://formulare.lib.vutbr.cz/dotazy/digitalni-knihovna/

9. Who is responsible for managing the fund supporting publishing in Gold Open Access?

The employee of the Central Library Petra Dědičová is managing the fund to support publishing in Open Access mode. You can contact her with any questions or concerns. You can also use the contact form at http://formulare.lib.vutbr.cz/dotazy/open-access

Nahoru

10. Where can I record contract with publishers regarding my article?

Archiving contracts with publishers and storing them into an Apollo application greatly facilitates any control whether your article may be published in the BUT Digital Library.

The simplest way is to "record" the contract (preferably in pdf) as another file, together with the file containing your copyrighted work (article, contribution to the proceedings, ...) to the Apollo system in section D results -> New publication

In case of any problems, please contact us using the contact form on the Open Access Portal (www.vutbr.cz/openaccess)

11. Can I publish other than the BUT employee works in BUT Digital Library?

Yes, whether the work is a "employee work" or not, does not decide whether it is possible to deposit it in BUT Digital Library. What is crucial is the type of document. Currently it is possible to deposit only the following types of works:

works intended to be published in professional journals (J type in RIV evaluation)
works to be published in the conference proceedings (type D in RIV evaluation)

The options will be extended in the future. The staff of the BUT Central Library continuously evaluate the situation in the field of open publishing and in good time will try to extend such works storable in BUT Digital Library.

It is also important to note that the BUT Digital Library also include thesis, which are inserted and published due to § 47b of the Act no. 111/1198 Coll.

12. How do I find out if the publisher where allows me to deposit my article in BUT Digital Library?

The purest and legally correct form is to analyse you contract with a publisher, where this issue should be mentioned. If not, the contract may still refer to the general terms and conditions of the publisher, where this area should be mentioned. If you do not find the necessary information on any of these sources, the publisher probably does not allow this option. Nothing, however, prevent you to ask the publisher about the possibility to insert the work into an institutional repository. The ideal time for this question is before the contract is signed, since then everything depends on the will of the publisher.

You can also proceed as follows:

Check publisher policy in the database SHERPA/RoMEO (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/)
Then trace this information in the contract or general conditions of the publisher ("you already know what you're looking for")

If you have any questions about this process, please feel free to contact the staff of the Central Library by using the contact form on the Open Access Portal (http://www.vutbr.cz/openaccess).

13. Is my work an employee work?

To determine whether work created by the author-employee is the employee work depends on the legal assessment of the particular work and especially its connection with the employment contract agreed between the employee and his employer.

"Unless otherwise agreed, the author’s economic rights to a work created by the author in fulfilling his duties arising from the employment or civil service contract with the employer or from an employment relationship between a cooperative and its member (hereinafter referred to as employee work) shall be exercised by the employer in his own name and on his own account. The employer may only assign the exercise of the right pursuant to this paragraph to a third party with the author’s consent, unless this occurs when an undertaking or any part thereof is being sold."

It is generally advisable to use mainly personal judgment of the author, who is most aware of whether the work creates for himself or for the fulfillment of his professional duties. In case of doubt the simplest way is to contact the administration of the department where the author works, and ask for an advice in this specific case.

Example: The author is a teacher and in his employment contract states that he should also create teaching materials to support teaching. If he does so, the work is the employee work, because it served to fulfill author's employment duties.

Conversely, a work which is closely related to the author's work, but the author of such work does not have an obligation to create such work as part of his employment duties is not an employee work. This presupposes, however, that the author did not create that work in his working hours or did not use the employer’s devices. In such cases, although the work is still not employee work, but the employer has the right to request reimbursement of costs incurred.

But it is always necessary to consider the specific case separately.

14. If my work is not the employee work, is it a subject of rights and obligations arising from the Directive 5/2012?

Yes, the BUT employee is obliged to follow the BUT rules during the work as a result of his employment contract. For that reason, an employee work that was created to meet the employee's employment duties is the subject to the BUT internal rules.

15. I have a condition publishing an article in OA mode in the project, can I use BUT Digital Library for this purpose? Can project rules affect the way the article would be published?

Yes, some projects require to publish articles in OA mode. It is required by some European projects - under the 7th Framework Programme or newly by Horizon 2020.

Such a condition can be met generally in two ways. This first is to to publish the article in one of Open Access Journals (ie. Golden Road OA). The second option is the Green Road OA, which allows you to save the published article in professional or institutional repositories. BUT Digital Library is the institutional repository for the fulfillment of the Green OA at BUT. Definitions of Gold and Green OA can be found on the Open Access Portal (www.vutbr.cz/openaccess) or in the publication Open Access at BUT.

For more information on how to deposit an article into BUT Digital Library can be found here: https://www.vutbr.cz/en/libraries/digital-library/how-to-publish.

16. What is Creative Commons license?

Creative Commons License (hereinafter CC license) are a set of open source licenses, which bring new opportunities in publishing. CC license operate on a simple principle: the author offers the license agreement to the indeterminate number of potential users and gives them some of the rights to his work and reserves other. CC license is not negation of the classical concept of copyright, its superstructure and as such are based on the Civil Code (§ 2358-2389 Law no. 89/2012 Coll., The Civil Code).

The popularity of the CC is based primarily on their international intelligibility, which is now even greater with the arrival of the new version 4.0. License Terms (or the rights and obligations of the user to the work) are graphically expressed using simple pictographs. [zdroj]

More on public licenses and what "public license" really represent from the law point of view, can be found out in the manual: "Public license in the Czech Republic" by authors from the Faculty of Law, Masaryk University, who are dealing with the topic in more detail in the framework of their project FLIP (Free License Integration Project). For more details see http://flip.law.muni.cz.

Another source of inspiration may be the Internet presentation of Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org).

17. What will BUT continue to strive in this direction?

By the signing of the Berlin Declaration and the issuance of the Declaration of institutional Open Access policy BUT committed to the ongoing support and promotion of the principles of OA not only on campus but also beyond. The effort of the University is to promote the OA movement both ways; green: by the maintaining of BUT digital library; and gold: by the operation of funds to support publishing in Open Access journals. In the future we would like to focus on Open data and consistent promotion of already existing means of support.

18. Where can I learn more about the Open Aire project?

OpenAIRE project and OpenAIREplus are projects funded by the European Commission in the 7th Framework Programme. OpenAIRE was completed in 2012 and OpenAIREplus will be completed by the end of 2014.

Their main objectives are:

provide infrastructure for scientists to make the results of research accessible in open access mode
encourage the establishment of open access policies on European, national and institutional levels
provide statistics on the use of accessible publications
connect publication with information on projects, research with data and outputs and information about individual researchers

Project results were reflected in the setting of OA policy in the program Horizon 2020.

For more information about OpenAIRE and OpenAIREplus please visit: https://www.openaire.eu/

19. Which Czech universities support OA?

Berlin Declaration was signed by the following Universities:

Repository is run in the following Universities:

Universities involved in the support of OA (e.g. by the events under the so-called. Open Access Week):

Czech University of Life Sciences Prague
University of South Bohemia in Ceske Budejovice
Mendel University in Brno
University of Ostrava
Technical University of Liberec

20. How does But Digital Library works?

The BUT Digital Library is an institutional repository that is used to store works created at BUT.

At present, there are mainly the university theses and articles from journals published at BUT.

BUT Digital Library works on the DSpace system, which is freely available as open source; it is maintained by the Central Library and CVIS.

Theses are recorded automatically from the University information system Apollo.

To upload an article or paper in the proceedings into the BUT Digital Library, the author must store the full text into the system Apollo and ask for the publishing. A representative of the library will check if everything is ok and the document can be deposit in the BUT Digital Library.

More information can be found on the Library Portal https://www.vutbr.cz/en/libraries/digital-library

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