Norway
The OA awareness in Norway is on a high level from the governmental top down to the institutional level. There is still a lot of work to raise the awareness on the level of the individual researcher. Norway promotes open access through institutional mandates and funder mandates. All work is coordinated by CRIStin, a governmental body with the responsibility for coordination of Open Access affairs.
There are approximately 70 institutional repositories in Norway covering the entire higher education sector.
Specialized health care is also covered well by a single common archive. The research institutes are lagging a little bit further behind, but the coverage is increasing rapidly. According to DOAJ Norway publishes 46 Open Access journals. Currently, 9 OA policies are registered in ROARMAP.
29 January, 2014: The Nordic Council of Ministers (NCM) introduced an Open Access mandate which applies to all written publications published by the NCM from 1 June 2014 onwards. The mandate and its effectiveness is to be evaluated annually by the NCM. In a second step, planned to be initiated during 2014, the Open Access mandate will be further developed and made applicable also to all written publications funded or co-funded by NCM grants or under NCM contracts. It was recommended that all written publications published by the NCM are published with a Creative Commons license, preferably CC-BY or CC-BY SA. This mandate applies to the NCM secretariat, NordForsk, Nordic Innovation, Nordic Energy Research, Nordicom, Nordic School of Public Health, Nordregio, and Nordic Centre for Welfare and Social Issues.
The Nordic Council of Ministers (NCM) is a publically funded co-operation between the governments of the Nordic countries (www.norden.org).
The Research Council of Norway recently launched the STIM-OA scheme to facilitate the transition to Open Access publication and to ensure that the results of publicly funded research are made as openly accessible as possible. The STIM-OA scheme will provide support to institutional publication funds or the like by covering up to 50 per cent of the institutions’ costs for open access publication from the previous fiscal year. The scheme is time limited, with a duration of five years (2015–2019).The STIM-OA scheme is open to all subject areas and all approved research institutions in Norway.
Enabling Environment:
The Berlin Declaration is not getting the attention it deserves; there are only a few signatories. Norwegian Research Council who is by far the biggest funder in Norway has strengthened their OA-policy, following up the government’s policy on the area. Open Access is firmly stated in two White Papers and thus provides the basis for the coordinating body CRIStin.
Potential Barriers:
- The major barrier is the lack of awareness of OA amongst individual researches; and the way OA is perceived as conflicting with academic freedom
- Though universities are well covered with institutional mandates; there is lack of policies in the health care and institute sector.
Major Projects/Initiatives:
OA is strategically placed in CRIStin, an organization who has a database of all published scientific material in Norway. This gives Norway an ideal position to also monitor development around all OA publishing, both green and gold.
Annual conference on Open Access organized by HE institutions in cooperation with CRIStin.
NSD is improving the White List of journals with information from DOAJ
BIBSYS is further improving and upgrading their hosting service and infrastructure for institutional repositories in Norway.
From 2014 the national search engine harvesting all Norwegian institutional archives (NORA), is integrated fully in the CRIStin system.
National and Institutional Level Policies/Mandates:
Norway has two white papers that explicitly state Open Access as a principle, but this is yet to be transformed into an action plan.
Details of Key Organizations:
Current Research Information System in Norway (Cristin)
Overview: Cristin is a organisation for research information and documentation in Norway. The organisation has been given responsibility and established by the Ministry of Education and Research and Ministry of Health and Care Services, and will cover the higher eduaction sector, research institutes and health autorities.
OA mandate: Responsibility for OA coordinaton
Communication address: Cristin, Forskningsveien 3b (map) 0373 OSLO Norway; e-mail: postmottak(at)cristin.no
National Library of Norway (NB)
Overview: The National Library of Norway aims to be the main source of information on Norway, its people and its culture and to make this available to the public. It has two sites in Oslo and Mo i Rana. It is the Legal Deposit Library of Norway.
OA mandate: Participant in European Digital Library (EDL) project.
Communication address: (Oslo) Henrik Ibsens Gate 110, NO-0225, Oslo, Norway; e-mail: nb(at)nb.no
Norwegian Research Council
Overview: The Research Council is Norway's official body for the development and implementation of national research strategy. The Council is the primary research and funding body in Norway and encourages international research cooperation.
OA mandate: Requires Open Access archive as part of the research funding process. Recommends self archiving of peer-reviewed articles in institutional OA archives or through OA electronic journals and allows for the expiry of the publisher's embargo period to be respected.
Communication address: Norwegian Research Council, Stensberggata 26, Oslo, Norway; e-mail: post(at)forskningsradet.no
Norwegian Knowledge Centre for Health Services Helsebiblioteket
Overview: The Norwegian Knowledge Centre for the Health Services (NOKC) provides research information, publicises research results and contributing to quality improvement and health service metrication to improve patient safety.
OA mandate: HeRA is the Norwegian Electronic Health Library's (Helsebiblioteket) open research archive for hospitals and other health institutions in Norway. It holds post print archives of peer reviewed journal articles, reviews, reports and other publications.
Communication address: Nasjonalt kunnskapssenter for helsetjenesten, PO Box 7004, St. Olavs plass, N-0130 Oslo, Norway; e-mail: post(at)nokc.no.
University of Bergen
Overview: The University of Bergen is an urban university with two sites: Årstadvollen is the University's "health campus", where dentistry, medicine and health-care lie close to the Haukeland and Haraldsplass university clinics and Nygårdshøyden where Natural and social sciences, psychology, the arts and law are taught.
OA mandate: A founder member of NORA, the university hosts Bergen Open Research Archive (BORA), its institutional repository for scientific and research outputs from the University of Bergen.
Communication address: University of Bergen Postboks 7800, NO-5020 BERGEN Bergen, Norway; e-mail: post(at)uib.no
University of Oslo (UiO)
Overview: The University is an active participant in the EU Seventh Framework Programme for research and development. It has 8 Centres of Excellence: Molecular Biology and Neuroscience; Physics of Geological Processes; Mathematics for Applications; Equality, Social Organization and Performance ; Study of Mind in Nature; Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis; Cancer Biomedicine; Immune Regulation; Theoretical and Computational Chemistry.
OA mandate: All researchers must deposit their metadata (for articles) in FRIDA, UiO's research documentation system. It is as yet only compulsory to deposit metadata, not full-text.
University of Oslo also hosts DUO, a full-text institutional repository. It is planned to integrate the two systems to aloe self-archiving of full-text through FRIDA for transfer to DUO.
Communication address: Postboks 1085, Blindern 0317 Oslo e-mail: postmottak(at)ub.uio.no
The University of Tromso
Overview: The University of Tromso a broad range of subject fields in six faculties/schools with studies in humanities, social sciences, natural sciences/mathematics/statistics/informatics, law, medical sciences and fisheries science at Bachelor's, Master's and PhD level. Priority subject areas are mainly related to the Arctic and subarctic regions; Northern Light and space research, fisheries research, biotechnology, multicultural societies, indigenous studies, community medicine, theoretical linguistics, among others. The University has a Strategy on Internationalisation based on the notion of academic quality and seeks to strengthen all aspects of the University’s activities.
OA mandate: A founder member of NORA, University of Tromso offers Munin Open research archive depository and Septentrio Academic Publishing, a publishing infrastructure for scientific and scholarly journals/serials. A publication fund has been established to cover APCs for research without sufficient external funding.
Communication address: University of Tromsø, Romssa universitehta, N-9037 Tromso, Norway; e-mail:posymottak(at)uit.no
University of Trondheim (NTNU)
Overview: NTNU is the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and is at the forefront of technological innovation. It has 7 faculties; hosts 3 Centres of Excellence: Quantifiable Quality of Service (Q2S); Ships and Ocean Structure (CeSOS); Centre for the Biology of Memory (CBM) and hosts 4 Centres of Innovation: Integrated Operations in the Petroleum Industry; Medical Imaging Laboratory for Innovative Future Healthcare; Structural Impact Laboratory; Sustainable Arctic Marine and Coastal Technology promoting research and development in cooperation with industry and other research organisations.
OA mandate: Founder member of NORA; has an agreement for free OA publishing with Springer (Open Choice).
Communication address: NTNU, NO-7491 Trondheim, Norway; e-mail: postmottak(at)adm.ntnu.no
Norwegian Social Data Center (NSD)
The Norwegian Association of Higher Education Institutions, (UHR)
Thematic Open Access projects/Initiatives
14-15 August, 2014: 'What is the Status of Open Access to Research Data in the Nordic Countries?' To increase and exchange knowledge about the respective Nordic countries’ views on Open Access, NordForsk invited representatives of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and the European Commission to a workshop on 14-15 August to discuss Open Access to research data.
Workshop participants were: Hanne-Louise Kirkegaard (Ministry of Higher Education and Science in Denmark), Sami Niinimäki (Ministry of Education and Culture in Finland), Jurki Hakapää (Academy of Finland), Ásdís Jónsdóttir (Ministry of Education, Science and Culture in Iceland), Roar Skålin (Research Council of Norway), Anna Wetterbom (Swedish Research Council), Leif Laaksonen (Research Data Alliance Europe (RDA) Project coordinator, Finland), Tómas Jóhannesson (Icelandic Meteorological Office and the Nordic Centre of Excellence SVALI), Johanna Ekström (Nordic Biobanking and Molecular Resource Infrastructure (BBMRI Nordic)), Gudmund Høst (Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration (NeIC)), Riita Mustonen (NordForsk), Anni Hellman (European Commission).
Norwegian Knowledge Centre for Health Services; Norwegian Institute for Drug and Alcohol Research has established OA repositories to serve aspects of the health sector; the Norwegian Institute of Palaeography and Historical Philology has instituted an OA policy.
30 November- 01 December 2015: The 10th Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing; Tromsø, Norway.
26-27 November 2014: The 9th Munin Conference on Scholarly Publishing; UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway
23-27 June 2014: IMBER Open Science Conference: Future Oceans; Bergen, Norway.
List of Publications
3 February 2015: Going for True Gold: WHy the Norwegian Research Council is Taking a Stand Against Hybrid OA Journals- A guest post by Jan Erik Frantsvag; http://www.digital-science.com/
24 November, 2014: Case Study: Education, Research and Open Access in Norway , PASTEUR4OA Project
Frantsvag, J.E (2008) Open access in Norway – where are we, and where are we going? Sciecom Info, Vol. 4, 1. Open Access.
Frantsvag, J.E (2011) The Open Access publication fund at the University of Tromso. In ScieCom Info. Vol 7, 1 (2011) Open Access.
Frantsvag, J.E (2010) The University of Tromso adopts an institutional open access policy. In ScieCom Info. Vol.6, 4. Open Access.
Harnad,S (2003) Open access to peer-reviewed research through author/institution selfarchiving: maximizing research impact by maximizing online access. In Digital Libraries: Policy, Planning, and Practice, eds. Derek Law and Judith Andrews: 63-98.
Hedlund, T and Rabow, I (2009) Scholarly publishing and open access in the Nordic countries Learned Publishing Vol 22, 3:177-186.
Huela, B N, (2010) Scholars and institutional repositories: perceptions of academic auth ors towards self-archiving their scholarly works in the Bergen Open Research Archive. Master’s Thesis. University of Oslo. Open Access.
Thorsteinsdóttir, S (2010) OA Mandates and the Nordic Countries Sciecom Info, Vol. 6, 1. Open Access.
White paper : Lange linjer
White Paper : Klima for forskning (Only in Norwegian)
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