Blog post by Laura Pipan (ODIPI) & dr. Maja Bogataj Jančič (ODIPI)
On Thursday and Friday, September 11-12, 2025, the 12th PUBMET Conference on Scholarly Communication in the Context of Open Science will be held in Zagreb, with the support of Knowledge Rights 21 (KR21).
PUBMET is a leading annual event for researchers, publishers, librarians, policymakers, and all those interested in the future of Open Science. Its programme covers a wide range of themes, including quality in open access publishing, research transparency, peer review, publication standards, and the role of artificial intelligence in Open Science. Among the main organisers is Dr. Iva Melinščak Zlodi from the University of Zagreb, National Coordinator of Knowledge Rights 21 (KR21) for Croatia and Chair of the SPARC Europe Board of Directors.
The conference will feature speakers supported by KR21 in Session 2: Legal Frameworks and Rights in Open Science on Thursday, September 11th (11:30 – 13:00), including national and regional KR21 coordinators as well as associated partners from IFLA, LIBER Europe, and SPARC Europe.
Ana Lazarova (National Coordinator for Bulgaria, Senior Assistant Professor at the Department of European Studies at Sofia University, Chair of the Bulgarian Digital Rights Association Digital Republic) will deliver a keynote lecture on Open Science and the legal regime of scholarly publications. Her presentation will focus on the Secondary Publication Right (SPR) as a solution to access barriers in European academic publishing. While some EU countries have already adopted SPR, including Bulgaria, enabling authors to republish their work in non-commercial repositories, challenges remain in embedding SPR fully into EU copyright law and in ensuring consistent institutional implementation. She will also discuss the Secondary Publication Obligation (SPO), which makes it mandatory to deposit publicly funded research in open access repositories.
Ignasi Labastida Juan (University of Barcelona), Iva Melinščak Zlodi, Vanessa Proudman (SPARC Europe), Clara Riera-Quintero (SPARC Europe) and Jon Treadway (Great North Wood Consulting) will present on the topic of How promising are institutional rights retention policies as a route to Open Science? Drawing on Project Retain, a two-phase research initiative led by SPARC Europe under the KR21 programme, the presentation will discuss rights retention and open licensing policies across Europe. The findings show how national laws, science policies, and institutional contexts shape adoption. Rights retention policies help researchers retain control over their work, improve open access compliance, and reduce reliance on publishers. The project also launched the European Rights Retention Community to foster knowledge exchange and support policy development.
Ana Lazarova, Eric Luth (National Coordinator for Sweden, Wikimedia) and Iva Melinščak Zlodi will present on Is the repository infrastructure ready for the implementation of secondary publication rights and rights retention? This presentation will introduce a community-driven mapping project, coordinated through KR21’s national contacts, that examines how repositories across Europe handle copyright and licensing metadata. The project will highlight gaps and inconsistencies in metadata practices, showcase promising approaches from OpenAIRE and the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), and explore the adoption of shared standards to strengthen repositories’ role in enabling Open Science.
Maja Bogataj Jančič (National Coordinator for Slovenia and Regional Coordinator for the Western Balkans Region) will give two presentations. First, she will present the KR21 study Barriers and Enablers for Open Science in Copyright Law, which examines Slovenia’s efforts to implement Open Science principles and highlights the gap between strategic goals and legal realities, particularly in copyright law. National differences in copyright law continue to complicate cross-border collaboration, reinforcing the call for a more balanced copyright framework that supports scientific progress. At the end of this session, she will also discuss the Rights Retention obligation and the Secondary Publishing Right in the Slovenian legal order, as Slovenia has been one of the leading EU countries in this area, with advanced legislative measures supporting strategy and Open Science.
We hope to see you at the conference!
11 September 2025
