Nordic Council of Ministers is promoting Open Access
N
iels Stern, Head of Publications at the secretariat for the Nordic Council of Ministers, is heading the Nordic Open Access project. His task is formidable: to fill the new platform with Nordic knowledge, while overseeing the formulation of an Open Access policy for the entire Nordic Council of Ministers (NCM) that harmonises with national, European and global Open Access policies. Nordic Council of Ministers designs a Nordic Open Access policy – The secretariat for the Nordic Council of Ministers, NordForsk and six other NCM institutions have agreed to provide free access to all knowledge published under the umbrella of Nordic cooperation, says Mr Stern. We are creating a modern and efficient publishing platform, Nordeana, where we will compile everything new that we publish. The technical solution already exists and is operated by Uppsala University, with which we now have a cooperation agreement. – We are formulating an Open Access policy for all our publications. We are doing it in two steps: – First, everything we publish ourselves will be available through open access. We expect to implement the policy in the spring of 2014. The second step will be a policy concerning the publications we have fully or partially funded, but which are published externally, for example in scientific journals. This step is more complicated because it involves many more stakeholders, but we consider it all the more important.
Niels Stern. Head of Publications at the secretariat for the Nordic Council of Ministers. Photo: Johannes Jansson/Norden.org
From policy to action The scientific community has been discussing open access for many years. From an idea which 10-15 years ago had only a scattered following, the open access movement
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has steadily gained momentum and is now coming to fruition, backed by political will. – Today we have free access to many publicly funded publications – but not to all of them, continues Mr Stern.