Open and Shut?: Open Access in Serbia: Interview with Biljana Kosanović

Use the link to access the interview.  An excerpt from the introduction reads as follows" ... If the library of the world’s wealthiest university can no longer afford to provide its faculty with all the research they need, I thought, how appalling must it be for researchers in universities based in less wealthy countries? It was for this reason that I made contact with Biljana Kosanović.  Serbia, we should note, is a transition country. It is also classified by many as a developing country (e.g. here and here). To my surprise, however, Kosanović, informed me that access to international research is not a serious problem in Serbia.  She added that this is because eleven years ago the Consortium of Serbian Libraries for Coordinating Acquisition (KoBSON) was created, and charged with negotiating and managing national licensing schemes (Big Deals) with scholarly publishers. The aim was to ensure that Serbian researchers had access to all the international journals they needed.  How do we know that access to international journals is currently satisfactory in Serbia? 'Two years ago — when we celebrated the tenth anniversary of KoBSON — we did a big survey of our users,' Kosanović explained to me. 'We got around 3,000 respondents — which is pretty good for a user population of 30,000. Based on that, I would say that our users are pretty satisfied with what we offer them. There were only a few publishers they mentioned that we don’t have in our collections.'  How can it be that access to research appears to be less problematic for Serbian researchers than it is for those based at Harvard University?  Read the interview with Kosanović below to find out. In doing so you will also learn something of the research information environment in Serbia, and you will learn about the current state of Open Access in the country — for despite Serbian researchers’ current satisfaction with their access needs, Kosanović is a committed OA advocate ..."