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

Authors

News:

Oslo University, Norway, has adopted an OA-policy. All personnel employed after 1 January 2012 shall deposit a post-print version of scientific articles created in the course of their duties in the institutional repository of the University of Oslo. Se Charlotte Børdes article below.

UK White Paper “Innovation and Research Strategy for Growth" commits the Government to require OA to all outputs from publicly funded research. David Willetts, the UK's Science Minister: ”We set out very clearly in the document today our commitment to open access. We want to move to open access, but in a way that ensures that peer review and publishing continues as a function. It needs to be paid for somehow. One of the clear options is to shift to a system from which university libraries pay for journals to one in which the academics pay to publish. But then you need to shift the funding so that the academics could afford to pay to publish." (The Guardian). Read more in our News section.

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

Our editor in Lithuania Meile Kretaviciene has interviewed the Lithuanian publisher Eleonora Dagienė, Chair of Council of The Lithuanian Association of Scholar Periodicals, about her views and experiences of Open Access. Eleonora Dagienė appreciates open access and believes that it gives greater opportunities for Lithuanian journals. For Lithuanian scientists, publishing articles in Lithuanian journals it is important that the journals support open access to enable world-wide distribution of their research.

Yvonne Hultman Özek has interviewed Mattias Collin, Associate Professor at the Department of Clinical Sciences, Lund University, Sweden. He started advocating OA when he became more and more frustrated by having to pay high page charges despite giving up the copyright to his own work. He has seen the attitudes to OA among his colleagues change from very sceptical to positive. He prefers the gold road to OA and he thinks that open access will be the standard way of publishing.

In her article “Open Access policy at the University of Oslo” Charlotte Børde, Senior Legal Adviser at the University of Oslo, illustrates the political background and the legal aspects of the Open Access policy regarding the self-archiving of scientific articles and theses in the University’s electronic, institutional repository (DUO). The policy was adopted by the Board of the University of Oslo University on December 6. The author presents the policy itself ans well as the institutional process leading up to it.

In “Strategic Publishing Rules – a Manual for Researchers” Peter Linde and Håkan Grahn at Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden, describe how they try to handle the conflict between the research assessment system with its emphasis on publishing in ISI-ranked journals and the demands for OA-publishing. This means ,that the have to stimulate ISI publishing at the same time as they want to meet the research funders’ requirements and benefit from the advantages of open access. Ways have to be found to meet both goals.

Stina Johansson, Chalmers Library, department for publishing services and bibliometrics, Gothenburg, Sweden, presents “The Geography of Science – an example from Chalmers”. The Chalmers Library participates in the ongoing research assessment of the eight Areas of Advance at Chalmers, and the bibliometricians wanted to study the collaboration patterns of the Chalmers researchers, what countries were involved, and how these patterns could be visualized.

In “Talking about open Access” Anne Sandfaer, Special consultant at the Danish Agency for Libraries and Media, presents the Knowledge Exchange partnership between DEFF in Denmark, JISC in the UK, DFG in Germany, and the SURFfoundation in Holland, This partnership has now launched a website, where they present Open Access success stories. The idea behind this site is to communicate these good examples between colleagues, whether these stories emanate from researchers, editors, publishers or other persons involved in the distribution of research results.

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

Ingegerd Rabow
Editor-in-chief