Finan­ci­al and tech­ni­cal support for open access scho­lar­ly jour­nals

The National Library has conducted an inquiry into the needs for financial and technical support in order to enable Swedish scholarly journals to transition into open access. The report is now available in English.

As a part of the National Library's government directive to coordinate the transition to open access to scholarly publications, several inquires were made during 2018–2019. One of the inquiries dealt with the challenges and needs for subscription-based scholarly journals to transition to open access.

Recommendations from the inquiry

The inquiry's directive was to put forward recommendations on how to make this transition.

The directive is based on the need identified in the Swedish Research Council's proposal for national guidelines to further investigate how technical and financial support for journals can benefit open access publication. The inquiry suggests that the National Library should establish and administer a national resource for open access journals.

The final report was originally published in Swedish in 2019.

Swedish open access journals on joint platform

In 2020 the National Library was commissioned by the government to establish a national platform for Swedish scholarly open access journals.

Although still in its start-up phase, organizations and higher education institutions are already showing great interest in the project. The goal is to create a national platform that increases the visibility of the published content, as well as enables users to browse all titles and subject areas.

The platform will also facilitate day-to-day work, by offering system functions for editorial workflows, such as the archiving of manuscript versions and reviewer comments.

Open access at the National Library

Since 2006 The National Library of Sweden has worked with advancing open access to scholarly output. The National Library received an appropriation directive in 2017 from the Swedish Government to act as a national coordinating body in the work towards a transition to open access to scholarly publications.

In March 2019, The National Library of Sweden submitted five investigations on various topics, as well as a final report, to the government. The aim was to develop recommendations for national solutions to specific challenges in the transition to an open access scholarly publishing system.

Read more about open access at the National Library here.