FAQS

FAQS

AFFILIATION

All papers or other published results must mention the author’s affiliation with Charles University. Again, responsibility for compliance with this requirement rests with the publishing author. 

As per Rector's Directive No 40/2021

For all publications resulting from work or study at the university, authors must include their official institutional affiliation in the format: “Name of the university, the name of the unit within the university”. If publications are in Czech or Slovak, the affiliation is given in Czech; if publications are in other languages, the affiliation is given in English.

If editorial rules or other considerations make it necessary to abbreviate the affiliation, the following Czech or English abbreviations are used:

Czech name

Czech abbreviation

English abbreviation

Univerzita Karlova

UK

Charles Univ

Fakulta sociálních věd

FSV UK

Charles Univ, Fac Soc Sci

AUTHOR(S)

All internal authors must be listed in the code list. An internal author is an author who either works in some capacity for or studies at Charles University. Authors may be classified as internal at more than one institution (depending on their affiliation), in which case the determining factor when making an entry in the OBD is which institution they report their publication for.

If a publication has multiple authors, all internal authors up to three external authors, if they are in the first three places, are listed. It is, however, also possible to list all authors. It is important to keep to the order in which they are listed in the publication.

If you cannot find an internal author in the code list, please contact the faculty coordinator.

AUTOMATIC DOWNLOADING OF ARTICLES

Articles registered in Web of Science databases are automatically downloaded to the OBD following their publication in a standard issue (i.e. not online first). Automatic importing from Scopus is conducted in batches. Articles are automatically imported only if their affiliation to the Faculty of Social Sciences is properly stated.

OBD entries must always be retrieved from the Pre-imported Container and supplemented with the source of funding and field of study; authors can do this themselves or will be invited to do so by a Faculty administrator.

However, this is no guarantee that technical complications will be avoidedYou are therefore advised to check, at least at the end of the collection period, that all your articles published in the current year are listed in the OBD.

BIBLIOMETRIC DATA FOR JOURNALS

Where to find the impact factor, quartiles and deciles and other indicators

Go to the JCR and search for a specific journal. Here you will see all the information you require. In addition to the above, the details here also include the immediacy index, cited half-life, and other information.

Example: AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW

In the profile for this journal, about halfway down the page, you will see a section called Rank by Journal Impact Factor. 
This tells you that the journal is third out of 376 journals in its category (Economics), which corresponds to Q1 (the first quartile according to the IF, or D1 if expressed as the decile).

DOI

The DOI (Digital Object Identifier) is a unique digital identifier assigned to electronic documents (e.g. journal articles). If a DOI is available for an article, it must be specified in the OBD.  

EARLY ACCESS / ONLINE FIRST

Once an article (or book) has been accepted for publication by the editorial board, it still often takes a very long time (a year or two, possibly even longer) to be featured in a standard issue of the journal. At that point, the paper is either under review or going to press (accepted for publication). Prior to being officially published, it is often released on the publisher’s website in an online version. During this time, the article may be given any of various labels indicating that it is a pre-release only, e.g. Early Access, Early View or Online First.

In the OBD, these articles are marked as “Article getting prepared for publication” and in the list they are accompanied by a capital “N”. Papers that are not yet published can only be saved with the status “Draft”. An article cannot be processed and submitted to the RIV until its final publication in a standard issue of the journal, i.e. after it has been assigned a journal volume and number and page numbering.

BOOK

In order for a publication to be submitted to the RIV as a type-B (“Book”) publication (whether a monograph or a collective monograph), it must meet the following criteria:

  • it has been assigned an ISBN
  • it presents original research findings
  • it has been peer-reviewed
  • has at least 50 printed pages
  • it covers a precisely defined subject in a specific scientific field
  • it contains a description of the methodology (i.e. a description of what scientific method was used and how it was applied)
  • it includes an English abstract (or a summary in another language)
  • the whole book is written by a united team of authors (individual chapters may have separate authors), i.e. the book must not be just a collection of thematically related papers (= proceedings)
  • it contains the author’s affiliation to Charles University, and ideally also to the faculty
  • if a book as a whole is in the RIV (B), individual chapters must not be submitted (C); this applies to a single submitter (= Charles University)

If a book as a whole is entered in the RIV (B), individual chapters must not be submitted (C); this applies to a single submitter (= Charles University).

OBD

The OBD is a module within the Science IS application. All types of publications defined by the national methodology for the evaluation of research organisations and other results are recorded in the OBD module. In particular, this means scientific publications, applied results, and other outputs of Charles University staff and students. 

Publications meeting the criteria for submission are submitted once a year (usually in spring) to the government’s Results Information Register (RIV)

WHY DOES MY PUBLICATION NOT APPEAR ON THE WEBSITE OF THE FACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES?

Have you entered an article, book or other publication in the OBD, but it has yet to appear in your publications on the faculty website? 

On the faculty website, every employee has an automatically generated list of their publications next to their contact details. These publications are imported from the OBD every evening. However, only entries that have been checked by a faculty administrator and have been given the “Approved” status are imported. This status means that they contain all the mandatory data and a decision has been made as to whether they will be submitted to the RIV. 

If you believe your publication should be listed on the website, but it is not there, please contact the faculty publications administrator.

RIV

Academic and Research Results Information Register (RIV)

This database collects information on the results of research and development projects and research undertakings supported with public funding in accordance with Act No 130/2002 on the support of research and development from public funds.

It is a database collecting data for the evaluation of the results of dedicated and institutionally supported research and development from all over the Czech Republic. In this respect, the submission of data (records of results) to the RIV is a prerequisite in order for institutional funding to be granted for research and development. R&D is assessed by the Research, Development and Innovation Council (an expert and advisory body of the Czech government)

Records of publications eligible for submission are sent from the OBD to the RIV once a year – see the Evaluation Methodology 2017+. These publications are included in the evaluation and are taken into account in the subsequent allocation of funding for Charles University.

UT WOS

This is the article identification number in the Web of Science database. If a paper has been registered in Web of Science, the UT WOS number must be entered in the OBD. It can be found directly next to article information, e.g. Accession Number WOS:000782985200001. In this case, the resulting UT WOS number is 000782985200001.

Funding method

All publications that are to be submitted to the RIV must have their source of funding noted in the OBD. This is an indication of the funds that have been spent on the production of the publication. As a rule, these are dedicated schemes – the Czech Science Foundation, the Technology Agency, the Charles University Grant Agency, SVV, and other specific programmes. Authors who have not drawn on any of these dedicated programmes may indicate the institutional programme Cooperatio – abbreviated as coop in the OBD (valid for 2022-2027).

Open Access

1. What does open access mean?

Open access (OA) is a publication model that seeks to achieve immediate, free, permanent and independent online access to the results of publicly funded science and research.  For more information, visit Open Access section.

2. What is the difference between green and gold open access?

The green route to open access is a combination of publishing an article in a journal (open or traditional with content available for a fee / subscription) and storing the full-text of the article in an open repository by the author (so-called self-archiving). 

The gold route to open access means publishing in an open (open access) journal, so that open access is not provided by the author, but by the publisher. 

Both routes to open access are fully complementary (they are not excluded) and from the point of view of increasing the visibility of your work it is appropriate to combine them. 

For more information, visit Open Access section.

3. Does Charles University have an open access policy?

Charles University does not have a mandatory open access policy. However, at its meeting on 15 December 2017, the Academic Senate of Charles University approved a draft of the Declaration of Charles University Academic Senate and university management on open access policy at CU (only in Czech), the aim of which is to set sufficient conditions for the subsequent determinat

4. What are the funding options for publication fees (APC) at Charles University?

Charles University currently does not have a central fund to cover the cost of open access fees. These fees are generally eligible costs in project budgets (it is therefore necessary to keep these costs in mind when designing a budget for new projects). 

Corresponding authors from Charles University can also take advantage of discounts and vouchers on open access publication fees at selected publishers

5. I have already published an article in a journal and now I would like to make it available in an open repository. What should I do?

An already published article can be make accessible through the green route to open access, i.e. by uploading the article to an open repository (self-archiving). A useful tool for finding a suitable repository is e.g. OpenDOAR or OpenAIRE database. 

However, it is always necessary to check in advance whether the publisher with whom you published the article allows self-archiving. The terms of self-archiving are usually stated in the license agreement, which the publisher negotiates with the author's team before publishing. If neither you nor the corresponding author has a license agreement, we suggest to use the SHERPA / RoMEO service, which is only of a reference nature. If the publishing agreement does not allow for self-archiving, request an exception through the addendum to the license agreement before signing. 

For more information on self-archiving options, see the section How to publish OA.

6. Is there a list of untrustworthy journals and publishers (so-called predators)?

The most well-known list of untrustworthy publishers and journals was the so-called Beall’s list, the operation of which was terminated in 2017 due to its controversy. The reasons for listing a journal are not always clear and may provoke a legal response from the accused publisher. For this reason, it is always necessary to assess the credibility of the journal or publisher with whom you want to publish. On the website of the Open Science Support Centre you will find characteristics of predatory journals/publishers and tips on how to avoid them. At the same time, the Centre prepared a clear factsheet for authors from CU containing basic information about predatory journals. 

7. Which finance providers require open access to published results?

In the lead of finance providers that require open access is the European Commission, but the number of them is expected to increase in the future. The Plan S initiative will be particularly involved.  You can find more information about specific providers on the website of the Open Science Support Centre in a separate section.

8. What is the difference between open repositories and scientific social networks such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu?

Academia and ResearchGate are commercial academic social networks whose main purpose is to connect researchers. They often try to collect personal information and you often need to log in to access content. Thus, they do not meet the definition of open access, which should be immediate, free, permanent and independent. 

Open repositories are non-commercial platforms that usually have wider options for storing articles (filling in metadata, etc.), at the same time they are interoperable with other tools and searchable by common search engines and aggregators of scientific content. Some repositories provide long-term archiving.  

9. I find the idea of open access interesting, but I need advice on how to proceed. Who can I contact at Charles University?

Open Science Support Centre was established for this purpose at Charles University. More information in the field of open access can be found on the website in the section How to publish OA, or you can contact us