On 8 October 2025, the European Commission launched two key AI documents:Blog post by Iva Melinščak Zlodi
The 12th PUBMET Conference on Scholarly Communication in the Context of Open Science was held in Zagreb on 11–12 September 2025. It has become the most significant Croatian event dedicated to open science and a meeting point for researchers, librarians, publishers, editors, students, policymakers, and all those passionate about open science and the future of scholarly communication. It has also grown to become more and more international, attracting actors and thinkers from across Europe.
The conference is jointly organised by the University of Zadar, the Croatian Association for Scholarly Communication (CROASC), the Ruđer Bošković Institute, the University of Zagreb, and the University of Rijeka. Long-term international supporters of PUBMET include SPARC Europe, EIFL, EASE, OpenAIRE, and OPERAS, with the Knowledge Rights 21 (KR21) programme joining this year as a new partner.
This year’s central conference theme was quality. Exploring questions, such as: What constitutes quality in open access scholarly communication? What defines quality in research, and how can it be assessed? How can open science contribute to improving the quality of scholarly outputs? What roles do researchers, universities, libraries, publishers, and service providers play in this process?
The discussion of quality extended to peer review and research assessment, legal frameworks for open science, research system reform, education and awareness, data sharing and reuse, diamond open access, infrastructures and tools, and the evolving standards of scholarly publishing.
KR21-Supported Session: “Legal Frameworks and Rights in Open Science”
A whole session was dedicated to the topic of quality in open science and its relation to legal frameworks, under the title “Legal Frameworks and Rights in Open Science.”
KR21’s involvement was crucial in shaping the session’s focus on the legal and policy aspects of open science, reflecting the programme’s broader mission to enable equitable access to knowledge through reform of copyright and related rights frameworks across Europe. This was an important opportunity to present, alongside international participants, key issues relevant to KR21 to the Croatian academic community.
The topic was particularly significant given that Croatia is one of the countries whose legal framework still lacks a Secondary Publication Right (SPR), and where institutional Rights Retention (RR) policies are either weak or entirely absent; only a few institutions gently recommend that authors retain rights in their internal policies. The same applies to the recently adopted national open science policy. It was therefore crucial to showcase international developments and potential benefits for scholarly communication.
The keynote lecture opening the session, “Open Science and the Legal Regime of Scholarly Publications,” was delivered by Ana Lazarova, KR21 national coordinator for Bulgaria, who introduced and described the SPR as a promising legal instrument to remedy systemic access barriers in the European academic publishing landscape. Alongside SPR, she also explained the concept of the Secondary Publication Obligation (SPO) and emphasised that even where SPR and SPO clauses are incorporated into national legislation, significant obstacles remain for the full realisation of their potential, due both to the lack of harmonisation at the EU level and to practical implementation challenges.
Following the keynote, a series of short talks and a lightning poster presentation took place.
Barriers and Enablers for Open Science in Slovenian Copyright Law
Maja Bogataj Jančič, KR21 regional and national representative for Slovenia, explained the various legal barriers to implementing open science in Slovenia (even with SPR and RR provisions in national law), while also highlighting positive and enabling aspects. Her talk was based on the KR21 study “Barriers and Enablers for Open Science in Copyright Law.”
How Promising Are Institutional Rights Retention Policies as a Route to Open Science?
This short talk was delivered by Ignasi Labastida on behalf of the rest of the team working within the KR21-funded SPARC Europe Project Retain: Iva Melinščak Zlodi, Vanessa Proudman, Clara Riera-Quintero, and Jon Treadway. He explained how rights retention policies offer a promising mechanism for enabling researchers to retain sufficient rights over their outputs, thereby facilitating wider dissemination and allowing reuse by others. The presentation summarised results from two Retain studies, especially the most recent one, “Building Bridges to Open Access: Paths to Institutional Rights Retention in Europe”, which explored how rights retention and open licensing policies are being developed and implemented across different legal, political, organisational, and economic contexts in Europe.
Repository-Related Challenges in Supporting Secondary Publication Rights and Rights Retention
This was a joint talk by the KR21 national coordinators for Bulgaria, Sweden, and Croatia: Ana Lazarova, Eric Luth, and Iva Melinščak Zlodi. The presentation assessed whether repositories across Europe, in terms of metadata quality and interoperability, are adequately equipped to support the implementation of SPR and RR. Current evidence suggests that this is not always the case, meaning that the adoption of RR policies or the exercise of SPR may be delayed or fragmented. In addition to discussing practical examples, this talk opened a discussion on the potential use of rightsstatements.org as a standard for communicating rights information across repositories within the open science ecosystem.
Open Science, Rights Retention and SPR in the Slovenian Legal Order
The session concluded with a lightning poster presentation by Maja Bogataj Jančič, presenting one of the most recent advances in improving the national legal framework in Slovenia, a development that could serve as both an example and inspiration for neighbouring countries, including Croatia.
Building Momentum for Change in Croatia
Although Croatian participants did not yet have first-hand experience with implementing SPR or RR policies, the discussion revealed strong interest in various aspects of legal frameworks and in ways of overcoming regulatory complexities shared by librarians, researchers, journal editors, repository managers, and infrastructure developers alike. The session provided a timely contribution to an ongoing debate in Croatia, one still in its early stages, and demonstrated how KR21’s research efforts and activities make a valuable contribution to guiding and shaping these discussions towards unlocking access to knowledge.
You can explore all presentations and abstracts, and soon also watch the session recordings, on the PUBMET conference website.
24 October 2025
