The National Library's mission is to coordinate, monitor, and promote collaboration in the work for open access to scholarly publications. The goal is for scholarly publications that are the result of research financed with public funds to be published with immediate open access.

During the transition to an open science system, The National Library is monitoring and reporting on the investments made, their size, the breakdown of various expense categories and their allocation across institutions. The annual report, covering the 2023 expenditures for scholarly publishing, has now been submitted to the government.

Increased costs for Swedish higher education institutions

In 2023, the expenditures for scholarly publishing increased by approximately SEK 61 million, to approximately SEK 799 million. This represents an increase of 8.2 per cent over the previous year. The majority of the institutions' expenditures are linked to agreements with commercial scholarly publishers, which typically apply annual percentage price increases. The higher education institutions' 2023 expenditures for open infrastructures have been collected and for the first time also incorporated into the summary.

Changes in the value of the Swedish krona relative to the currencies in which agreements are signed have affected the increase in costs. The general inflation rate during 2023 was approximately 5.5 per cent in the euro area and approximately 4.1 per cent in the US.

Compared to institutions' funding for research and for education at the doctoral level, the expenditures in 2023 remained unchanged from 2022. According to the Swedish Higher Education Authority (Universitetskanslersämbetet, UKÄ), the institutions' research funding for 2023 was SEK 52.4 billion. Expenditures for scholarly publishing thus represent approximately 1.5 per cent of the income, the same proportion as in the previous three years.

Open infrastructures

A prerequisite for an open science system is robust, scalable, open infrastructures that enable the collection, storage, organisation, access to, sharing, and assessment of research. Examples of open infrastructures that institutions use include Crossref, Directory of Open Access Journals, and Kriterium. The national guidelines for open science emphasise the importance of open infrastructures and set a goal for such open services and infrastructures to be funded nationally in a coordinated manner. In particular, non-profit open infrastructures should be supported.

Institutions' expenditures on open infrastructures amount to approximately SEK 9.5 million, which constitutes just under 1.2 per cent of the total expenditures. Excluding the expenditures for open infrastructures, total expenditures for 2023 increased 6.9 percent from 2022.

Open access publications

Over the past four years, expenditures have risen 12.7 percent, from SEK 709 million in 2020 to SEK 799 million in 2023. During the same period, the number of articles openly accessible via Bibsam's publishing agreements increased by nearly 41 per cent, from about 11,000 to 15,500.

Expenditures for the so-called transformative read-and-publish agreements, through which the majority of openly accessible articles are published, accounts for 56 per cent of the total expenditures. This is the largest expense item for institutions. The purpose of these agreements is to redirect payment flows from a subscription-based to an open access publishing system. However, the transition is slow — so slow that it risks becoming a permanent business model rather than a transitional phase. To counteract this and further drive the transition to open access, the Association of Swedish Higher Education Institutions (Sveriges universitets- och högskoleförbund, SUHF) has established recommendations regarding the path beyond transformative agreements.

Contact information

Henrik Schmidt, Open Access team at the National Library of Sweden:
henrik.schmidt@kb.se
010-709 32 65

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