Norway sets national open access goals

On August 22, 2017 the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research (Kunnskapsdepartementet) released National goals and guidelines for open access to research articles.  It sets out not just an open access mandate, but a number of accompanying steps and activites.  As the English document itself is brief, I will just highlight a few items:

• The goal of the government is to make all publicly funded Norwegian research articles openly available by 2024.
• The research community ... is expected to ... convert important journals within their subject areas from closed subscription based journals to open access titles.
• All publicly funded research articles must be deposited in a suitable academic repository.
• Institutions and consortia that negotiate agreements with publishers shall ensure that these agreements promote open access without increasing total costs, and that the terms and conditions are open and transparent.
• Institutions that fund research projects shall contribute to cover the costs associated with open access publishing.

It also sets a goal to "Investigate how a national repository can be realised."

You can read the full document - National goals and guidelines for open access to research articles (PDF).

So it is a multi-part policy, including not just open access publication, but also mandatory deposit (green OA), license negotiations including open terms and conditions, and direct funding support for open access costs.

In the FAQ (in Norwegian only) it makes it clear that researchers can choose their venue of publication (including closed publishers), but must always deposit their article.  It points to the Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers as one source of information for choosing journals, as well as the DOAJ.  Researchers without an institutional repository are directed to contact BIBSYS for guidance.

The target to ask the research community to shift journals to open access is one I haven't seen other countries pursue.  It is a reminder of the many paths that organisations and countries are following to shift to open access, from Harvard's 2012 Faculty Advisory Council language of "move prestige to open access"¹, to the 2017 European Commission Open Science plans to launch their own OA journal ("Horizon 2020 platform for open access publishing"). 

In Norwegian:

• announcement: Åpen tilgang til vitenskapelige artikler
• page: Open tilgang til vitskapelege artiklar
• more detailed page: Nasjonale mål og retningslinjer for åpen tilgang til vitenskapelige artikler
• policy document: Nasjonale mål og retningslinjer for åpen tilgang til vitenskapelige artikler (PDF)
• detailed FAQ: Utdypende informasjon og spørsmål/svar om retningslinjene for åpen tilgang til vitenskapelige artikler

¹ The Harvard Faculty Advisory Council memo is no longer online, it looks like it went offline sometime in 2015.  I have linked to a version in the Internet Archive.

Sidebar: Norway has a national research information system called CRIStin.