An Increased Use of the Institutional Repository by Researchers from 7% to 45%: Lessons from the Open Access Campaign at the School of Economics and Business, University of Ljubljana.

The beginnings of the awareness on the significant value of open access (OA) for both scientific research and wider society are found in Slovenia in the first decade of 2000. A major breakthrough in this field was the ODUN project, co-financed by the European Union Regional Development Fund and the Ministry of Education, Science and Sports of the Republic of Slovenia. During the lifetime of the project, more precisely from 2007 to 2013, institutional repositories were established for several Slovenian universities, including the Repository of the University of Ljubljana (RUL) (Ojsteršek et al., 2014). The acquisition of the latter enables researchers to deposit their research articles and other publications in the institutional repository, which complies with the OpenAIRE guidelines.

In our poster, we provide an examination of the changing behaviour of researchers at the School of Economics and Business, University of Ljubljana (SEB LU) towards both RUL and OA in the period from 2017 to 2021, by comparing the percentage of scientific articles published in each year and deposited in RUL. None of the 145 articles published in 2017 is deposited in RUL. A slight increase is evident in the subsequent years, with 3 out of 163 (1.84%) articles published in 2018 and deposited in RUL, and 17 out of 220 (7.73%) articles published in 2019 and deposited in RUL. For articles published in 2020, there is a huge increase observed, since as much as 80 out of 172 (46.51%) articles published in that year are also deposited in RUL. As regards 2021, the data at the end of October show a slight drop in this number with 71 out of 183 (38.80%) articles deposited in RUL.

It can be assumed that the sudden increased use of RUL is the result of an ongoing OA campaign which was started in early 2020 by the Central Economics Library located at SEB LU. The aim of the campaign is to inform researchers about not only the benefits of OA and funder mandates, but also opportunities for OA publishing. The campaign in addition shifts the time-consuming work of depositing articles in RUL from researchers to library staff, making it the most important feature of the campaign, as OA options are checked for all published articles. Whenever applicable, the version of record or the author accepted manuscript is deposited in RUL by the library staff.

Some of the techniques used in the campaign include:

• OA presentations for researchers,
• advising individual researchers on specific OA issues,
• informing researchers about OA developments and training opportunities via the SEB LU newsletter,
• an OA guide created using the LibGuides tool.

References
Ojsteršek, M., Kotar, M., Ferme, M., Hrovat, G., Borovič, M., Bergant, A., Bezget, J. & Brezovnik, J. (2014). Vzpostavitev repozitorijev slovenskih univerz in nacionalnega portala odprte znanosti. Knjižnica. Revija za področje bibliotekarstva in informacijske znanosti, 58(3), 15–39