From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 23 Apr 2013 11:16:31 +0100

Bożena Bednarek-Michalska is an information specialist and deputy
director of the Nicolaus Copernicus University Library in Torun,
Poland. She is also a member of Poland's Open Education Coalition
(KOED), a board member of SPARC Europe, and the EIFL-OA country
coordinator for Poland.

While conducting the interview with Bednarek-Michalska three things
struck me as noteworthy about the current state of Open Access in
Poland.

First, Bednarek-Michalska reports that access to research information
in Poland is "not bad". In light of Harvard University's 2012
Memorandum arguing that subscription-based scholarly publishing is now
"fiscally unsustainable" this is striking. Harvard is the world's
wealthiest university. If Harvard is struggling, why are Polish
universities not struggling too?

The second thing to strike me was that, unlike most journals published
in Western Europe and North America, Polish journals are not viewed as
a source of revenue. Indeed, since it is assumed that the role of
scholarly journals is to disseminate research, rather than make money,
they tend to be subsidised. For this reason, no doubt, many Polish
journals are produced not by commercial publishers, but by the
organisations that generate the research in the first place --
universities and institutes.

Third, it would appear that activists in Poland tend to view OA as
just one component of a much broader movement for openness. This is
perhaps because they became interested in the topic at a later stage
than those in the West (where OA has been an issue for some twenty
years now). As a result, they entered the debate at a point where a
number of different open movements were beginning to coalesce.

This broader approach is reflected in a new draft bill called the "Act
on Open Public Resources". If the bill were to become a reality it
would apply to all publicly-funded scientific, educational and
cultural resources. That is, it would cover not just scholarly papers
and scientific data, but (where they were publicly-funded, or produced
by a public institution) "maps and plans, photographs, films and
microfilms, audio and video recordings, opinions, analysis, reports
and other works and subject-matter of related rights in the meaning of
the law of 1994 on copyright and related rights, as well as databases
in the meaning of the law of 2001 on the legal protection of
databases." (As translated by Tomasz Targosz of Jagiellonian
University).

The interview can be read here:

http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/open-access-in-poland-interview-with.html

Richard Poynder