OA awareness rises rapidly in Finland

Abstract

The year 2003 was a clear turning point concerning the awareness among Finnish academics and academic librarians of the possibilities of open access publishing. A workshop organised by the Hanken business school to disseminate the results of the EU-project SciX provided the impulse for the founding of a working group that lobbies for wider adoption of Open Access in Finland. FinnOA is chaired by Professor Bo-Christer Björk and includes representatives from the central Finnish organisations affected by OA; the national library, several universities and university libraries, the association of scientific societies, research institutes etc. In addition to the main working group, which meets regularly about every two months, a number of task groups for institutional repositories, journal publishing and information dissemination have been established.