At the end of last century, on the initiative of researchers, open science has developed as a new form of scientific communication. Supported by new ways of providing knowledge and information, new possibilities for transforming the tasks of academic librarians have emerged. We were interested in the role of academic librarians in the field of open science and how it is perceived by Slovenian academic librarians. For the purpose of this master thesis, we conducted a survey among academic librarians at three public universities in Slovenia. The results of the survey showed that most of the interviewees understood the notion of open science merely as open access to scientific publications and research data and metadata related to them. Moreover, the interviewees highlighted the construction of a repository as a very important task in the work of an academic librarian in the field of open science. We found, however, that the latter is more important to librarians working at the University of Maribor than those who work at the University of Ljubljana. More than half of the interviewees claimed that the tasks in their library related to open science are carried out by someone qualified for this type of work. We believe that academic librarians in Slovenia could be more involved in performing the tasks related to open science. Professional meetings and open access web portals serve as excellent means of providing knowledge to librarians.
|
