News

On 21 May 2026, the Assembly of the Higher Education Institutions Council took place, focusing primarily on the new Higher Education Act, but also addressing the area of open science. 

In its Resolution (Czech only), the Council of Higher Education Institutions highlights the need to revise the criteria used to evaluate research both nationally and globally. In their current form, these criteria incentivize publication strategies that prioritize increasing individual citation scores at the expense of quality and the effective communication of results. The Council therefore calls on researchers and higher education institutions to familiarize themselves with the Stockholm Declaration on reforming scholarly publishing and to consider endorsing it, whether in its entirety or in part. It further urges competent authorities to take the principles of the Declaration into account when assessing research outputs of both institutions and individual researchers. 

In the Resolution, the Council also expressed support for the so-called diamond open access model as an ethically, economically, and academically sustainable approach to scholarly publishing. This model charges neither authors nor readers, is governed by the academic community, and enables fair and open access to the results of publicly funded research. 

As many Czech researchers have recently pointed out, article processing charges (APCs) for open access publishing are often very high and, alongside high subscription fees, represent another channel through which public funds for research are transferred to a small number of commercial publishers. This issue is also highlighted in the statement Opportunities and Challenges of Open Science in the Czech Republic (Czech only) by the Open Science Working Group of the Association of Libraries of Czech Universities. The Council of Higher Education Institutions likewise notes in its Resolution that the diamond open access model represents a responsible way of managing public funds, as it limits their outflow to disproportionate profits of a small group of commercial publishers and allows funding intended for research to remain within the academic environment and be reinvested for the benefit of research and researchers. 

If you wish to publish openly and free of charge, you can search for “diamond” journals in the DOAJ directory, where you can filter journals based on whether they charge publication fees. Alternatively, you can deposit your publication in the Charles University Research Publications Repository and, in accordance with the publisher’s licensing terms, make it available either immediately or after an embargo period. If you are unsure how to interpret licensing terms, do not hesitate to contact the legal support team of the Open Science Support Centre at: openlaw@cuni.cz. 

Pic. 1: Screenshot from the website doaj.org with an indication of where you can filter journals with no publication fees.