Aiding scientific journals towards open access publishing

 

See NOAP's wiki here.

 

Summary

The Purpose of this project addresses Open Access from the point of view of the publication of Open Access journals, including both the transition of existing journals to Open Access mode, and suppor¬ting leading scientists in our universities that wish to create new journals in Open Access mode. Our primary purpose is to provide information and tools for those university based organisations that serve as publishers for these Open Access journals, including both university libraries, university (electronic) presses, and others like them.

 

The project is organized as six work groups (WG) that address different aspects of the overall topic of the project. Many of the activities are know-how-oriented and their goals are to analyze, discuss, and present important issues, where the appropriate ways of structuring an Open Access journal and presenting it to its stakeholders is probably the most central one.

 

Several other activities concern the gradual improvement of editorial software systems, in particular to meet the needs of Nordic language use, but to some extent also for other issues such as small-volume printing and the treatment of research data in the peer review process. In addition, some activities focus on policy aspects both within universities and on the national levels.

 

There are two major aspects of the project’s Nordic usefulness. For those scientific journals that are published in Nordic languages (rather than English), the use of Open Access will be very important both as a means of survival since it allows a cost reduction, and as a means of increasing the visibility of the journal’s contents. The continued effective use of Nordic language for scientific publication is very important in a number of areas of science and culture, and it is an important cultural priority for the Nordic region.

 

The participants in this project are working actively on developing Open Access services, and in fact most of the major actors in the area in the Nordic countries are members of the applicant group. This is a guarantee that the results that come out are relevant for the topic and that they will be used in the years to come. The project has a strong knowledge exchange concept which will secure dissemination and involvement.

 

 

Project managers
 

Håkan Carlsson, Director of Scientific Communication

Lund University Libraries

 

and

 

Erik Sandewall, Professor of Computer Science (datalogi)

Linköping University
                
Project participants

• Museum Tusculanum Press, Copenhagen, Denmark 
• Copenhagen Business School Library, Copenhagen, Denmark
• Lund University, Lund, Sweden
• Linköping University, together with Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm), Sweden
• University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
• University of Tromsø, Tromsø, Norway
• University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
• Federation of Finnish Learned Societies Helsinki, Finland