The Virtual Library of Science
The Virtual Library of Science (WBN) is a program for purchasing and providing access to global knowledge resources in the form of electronic journals, books, and databases for Polish academic and scientific institutions. The program is co-funded by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education (see state budget funding information) and is predominantly implemented by ICM. Within WBN, access to resources is purchased on publishers’ servers under annually renewed licenses; however, a large portion of these resources is continuously archived on the Infona server at ICM. This ensures perpetual use of the archives in the event of a temporary or permanent loss of access to publishers’ servers, particularly if a license is not continued.
The origins of WBN date back to 1996–1997 when, with the financial support of the State Committee for Scientific Research, national servers were launched at ICM for the Beilstein and Gmelin chemical databases, the Medline abstract database, and—one of the first in the world—the Ovid Biomedical Collections full-text database, which at the time contained several dozen leading biomedical journals alongside the journals Science and Nature. These resources were initially made available to over a dozen of the largest universities and several research institutes under consortium licenses, with costs partially covered by the participating institutions. The scope of resources and the number of WBN users grew steadily, reaching over 3,000 journals and more than 100 universities and research institutes nationwide by 2009. In 2010, the Ministry of Science and Higher Education introduced full funding for selected resources under national licenses, which can be accessed free of charge by all public and private higher education institutions as well as all non-commercial research units, including those of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN) and R&D institutes.
Currently, WBN provides access to the complete journal collections of over a dozen of the world’s most important scientific publishers, encompassing a total of more than 7,000 current titles, around 4,000 of which are available under national licenses from Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley with national archiving rights. Approximately 142,000 e-books, primarily from Springer, have also been purchased under national licenses. The journals Science and Nature, the Ebsco platform (which aggregates journals from various publishers), and the Web of Science and Scopus abstract and bibliometric databases—along with their auxiliary analytical tools InCites and SciVal—are also available via national licenses. Alongside national licenses, WBN co-funds consortium licenses for access to international journal collections from ACS, IEEE, IOP, LWW, OUP, and T&F, the Reaxys chemical database, and the JSTOR platform, which aggregates journals and other resources from various publishers.
Since 2010, WBN has also funded the Springer Open Choice national open-access publishing program for Polish authors, and since 2014, Poland’s participation in the international Scoap3 open-access publishing program. At the end of 2018, the Minister of Science and Higher Education, expressing in a letter to the University of Warsaw the intent to fund national licenses for 2019, noted that the conditions for executing this task should “relate to the changes occurring due to the introduction of Plan S and be grounded in international solutions and directions.” The transformative mechanisms envisioned in Plan S have been integrated into the Springer, Elsevier, ACS, IOP, OUP, and LWW licenses, which simultaneously cover journal access and open-access publishing programs within these journals.
