Welcome to the June 2011 issue of ScieCom info. Nordic-Baltic Forum for Scientific Communication.

Abstract

There has been a lot of international concern about Elsevier’s recently changed Open Access Policy. We can now publish a formal statement made by the Swedish national OpenAccess.se programme, run by the Swedish National Library to promote OA to research results produced by Swedish researchers. The Steering Committee is deeply concerned about any changes that restrict availability and strongly objects to Elsevier’s new policy. “OpenAccess.se Statement: Concern about Elsevier’s Open Access Policy.”

An Open Access Policy has now been adopted by the Karolinska Institute (KI), Stockholm. The Policy will be in effect from July 1, 2011. KI encourages its researchers to make their publications to the greatest possible extent freely available, taking into account publisher terms and relevant demands of grant-awarding bodies and government authorities.  es. Read KI’s Open access Policy here

The DOAJ team in Lund is happy to announce that the DOAJ site is now available in French. Other languages will follow.
http://nile.lub.lu.se/ojs/index.php/sciecominfo/article/view/5146/4602

Will the more mundane communication channels have any roles in scholarly publishing? Will they seriously challenge the old academic publishing traditions? We hope to inspire lively discussions with the article “Taking new routes: Blogs, Web sites, and Scientific Publishing “by Helena Bukvova, a researcher and lecturer at the Dresden University of Technology. Helena Bukova presents several new aspects of web usage for researchers.

We continue to follow the promising OA developments in Denmark. Lise Mikkelsen has earlier reported on the hearing process for the first draft of the “Recommendations for implementation of Open Access in Denmark”. The final version has now been released. In “Central Open Access activities in Denmark” Lise Mikkelsen  takes us through the key events related to the final Recommendations, and presents some of the main areas in the Danish Open Access Committee’s final recommendations for implementing a national OA-policy in Denmark.

“Promote a national open access policy and create the necessary conditions for an efficient implementation of it” is one of the most important goals for the new strategy recently adopted by the Steering Committee for the Swedish OpenAccess.se programme. The main purpose of the Programme is to help increasing the share of freely available research publications on the Internet. “Strategy for the OpenAccess.se programme 2011-2013” was adopted at the Committee’s May 23rd meeting.  The new strategy also defines goals for specific areas as well as the means to reach them.

Jan Erik Frantsvåg has earlier presented, “The Open Access publication fund at the University of Tromsø”. His colleague Leif Longva now reports on “Doctoral theses are now submitted electronically at the University of Tromsø”. It all started in late 2007, when an electronic submission portal for master theses was introduced.  The great success of this portal led them to consider doing the same for doctoral these. They had been surprised to notice that doctoral candidates were reluctant to include their theses in the Munin open archive. Encouraged by the earlier success the library launched a similar service for doctoral theses.

We hope that you will have a god read. Your comments and ideas are very welcome

Ingegerd RabowEditor-in-chief