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

Abstract

In our “Open Minds” interview series we can now present interviews from Finland, Iceland and Lithuania.

• Our editor in Helsinki Turid Hedlund has interviewed three members of the Finnish Open Access working group FinnOA, founded in 2003 in Helsinki by professionals from academia, libraries, learned societies and publishers:  “Open minds towards open access: An interview with members of the FinnOA working group”.

• Solveig Thorsteinsdottir, our Icelandic editor, talked to Ian Watson, assistant professor of social science at Bifröst University in Iceland, editor of the Bifröst Journal of Social Science, and also manages the library at the Reykjavík Academy, an association of Icelandic researchers and scholars. He gives his views on OA in “Open Minds – An Interview with Ian Watson”

• Emilija Banionyte, Ausra Vaskeviciene, and Gintare Tautkeviciene have asked two influential groups of Lithuanian stakeholders, four politicians and four scientists, about their opinions and experiences of OA. “Open Minds” Interviews with Lithuanian politicians and famous researchers about Open Access”.

• The topic of Megajournals is hot. What are megajournals? Will they revolutionize our current system of scholarly communication? Our Norwegian editor Jan Erik Frantsvåg discusses all this in “The Mega-journals are coming!”

• With new technologies come new and unforeseen problems. Trude Eikebrokk, Bettina Grødem Knutsen, and Jimi Thaule, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, have encountered some of them: “Exploring Handheld Devices and Digital Learning: the iPad project at Oslo University College”.

• Oslo University College (OUC) was one of the last Higher Education (HE) institutions to get an institutional repository. Mid-June 2010 their Open Digital Archive, ODA, went public. In "Carrot or stick, incentives or mandates, or both" Tanja Strøm looks at the key events resulting in ODA, and describes the incentive scheme. implemented at OUC.

• Lars Björnshuage’s rallying key-note speech at the recent PKP-conference in Berlin “We have won the argument about OA - now we have to bring things together and make it work” lists major achievements this far,  and outlines future routes of action.

We hope that you will have a god read.

Your comments and ideas are very welcome

Ingegerd Rabow
Editor-in-chief