Open Access in the Nordic Countries

 

In September 2006 Nordbib set up an agreement with two Nordic consultants to make the analysis and report for Nordbib on Open Access under the focus area for Policy and Visibility (Work Package 1).

 
The consultants who wrote the publication are Ingegerd Rabow, PhD and Senior Librarian at Lund University Libraries Head Office and Turid Hedlund, professor at HANKEN, Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration in Helsinki.

 

The first part of the publication - the State of the Art Report - was pre-published in connection with the workshop on Open Access 23 - 24 April 2007 in Elsinore, Denmark. It provides information about the present state regarding Open Access within scholarly publishing in the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden).

 

Attention is brought to overall national policy issues and initiatives concerning the shift of paradigm in scholarly publishing especially where it influences on Open Access to scientific information for research and education but also where it influences on the rights of the researcher in publishing. Success stories and challenging issues on Open Access approaches will make the bases of the report and be used for discussions on the coming policymaking workshop in April 2007.

The final edition of the publication Open Access in the Nordic Countries became available early July 2007 and includes a second part - Workshop Views and Recommendations. In this part the selected issues, chosen as topics for the group discussions undertaken by the 80 participants during the workshop, are implemented. Recommendations from the workshop participants have been included as well as a conclusion.

It is worth noting that neither the report nor the workshop represents the view of the context of issues on behalf of the libraries only, but on the contrary acts as an informative basis for the cross-border discussions in the means of promoting Open Access to scientific information.