Global challenges, such as the recent coronavirus epidemic, call for the establishment
of equitable models for publishing results of scientific studies. At
the end of 2020, the Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER) published
an initiative to lift the time lag (embargo) on the scholarly works in
the online repositories (i.e. publication in green open access), also known as
self-archiving. LIBER drafted model legislation and proposed it for adoption
by EU Member States with the intent to empower authors and other holders
of economic copyrights in scientific works in relation to the oligopoly of the
most eminent international scientific publishers. The German legislator was
the first in the EU to introduce a new secondary publishing right in 2013,
while an abbreviated version of this right was adopted in Spain already in the
2011. Slovenia has been announcing the adoption of a normative framework
to facilitate transition to open science for seven years. New Scientific Research
and Innovation Activities Act, which also regulates self-archiving in Slovenia,
entered into force in December 2021. The comparative analysis of the secondary
publication right in six EU Member States has shown that the adopted
version of the right in Slovenia is in line with the others, but fails to stipulate
anything about the LIBER proposal to lift the embargo.
Key words: open science, copyright, scientific publishing, secondary publication
right, selfarchiving, green open access.