Welcome to our December issue!

Abstract

The theme from our previous issue, Open Higher Education , continues with an article by professor Gunnar Grepperud, Tromsø University Norway. Grepperud reflects upon Open Learning - experiences and paradox , and the prevailing rhetoric in the field of education, especially within lifelong learning. He dissects the current ideology and conceptions surrounding adult learning and confronts them with reality.

Adam Brenthel et al presents the Swedish National Data Service (SND) in their article about the importance of Producing Connections between Research Data and Publication . The Database Infrastructure Committee (DISC) is part of the Swedish Research Council’s infrastructure initiative. DISC's mission is to promote the development of an effective infrastructure for sharing research data resources in Sweden, The development of SND has been one of their key issues..

In her article Financing of the Norwegian open access journals , Else Dagfrid Bratland summarizes the main results presented in her Bachelor’s thesis on this subject. An important feature of Norwegian OA journals is that they are largely based on voluntary contributions. External support and sponsorship are almost absent as business models. Article processing charges have not been officially tried out in Norway.

The one stop shop to Open Access Journals – DOAJ . Anna-Lena Johansson and Ingela Wahlgren from the DOAJ team in Lund give inside in formation about developments, and 'vital statistics' on the birth of new OA-journals, geographical distribution, usage, membership, selection criteria, and future plans.

Two Icelandic Open Access Repopsitories. Áslaug Agnarsdóttir, et al describe Hirslan and Skemman, the wo repositories in Iceland. Skemman is developing into a cooperative project of the universities in Iceland, mostly housing dissertations and theses at the moment. Hirslan is a subject based repository for medical and health science, and an institutional repository for Landspitali University Hospital. Both repositories use DSpace, are listed in DOAR and ROAR and are searchable through Google Scholar.

Ingegerd Rabow
Editor