Open access policies in Norway Frode Bakken Birzeit 26th of May 2009

Norwegian librarians in higher education raise the question of open access The concern is promoted towards the Norwegian Association of Higher Education Institutions This association accepts to bring forward the ideas of open access tEnglish.pdfhttp:// tEnglish.pdf

At this time there were no official policy statements from the Norwegian government on open access But government agencies supported with funding an initiative to make a common platform for open access- activities NORA - Norwegian Open Research Archives

NORA is the organisation of the Norwegian Open Research Archives NORA ensures nationwide common metadata policies and vocabularies, making it possible for services to use NORA as a "single point of harvesting". NORA has a common search facility with advanced search capabilities. An advanced search in NORA can be subscribed to as an RSS-feed

A lot of academic institutions develop their own local open access archives The libraries are normally the driving forces in each institution That means that the development depends on the library directors and the library and IT staff the Norwegian Association of Higher Education Institutions is very active organising seminars and conferences promoting open access and building open access archives

During these years there is large OA-activity but still no official policies This shows: open access is or can be a movement from below Not initiated by the government but from libraries and some academics

NEW DEVELOPMENT June 2008: the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research asked for advise from the Norwegian Association of Higher Education Institutions on open access The Ministry asked: which measures should be prioritized to stimulate an increase in the Open Access publication of peer-reviewed scientific articles

The Ministry asked for proposals directed at encouraging self-archiving as well as other Open Access publishing activities, with an aim of increasing the availability of research results through encouraging use of Open Access

The Norwegian Association of Higher Education Institutions presented its report on 30 January 2009 Because of the limited scope of the Ministry’s request, monographs and textbooks are not considered in the report. Open Access publishing of PhD dissertations also falls outside the report as do other student theses and reports. However, this does not mean that these are not important tasks for institutions to consider.

To summarise, the Ministry of Education and Research, in addition to opinion-building, should prioritise the following measures at a national level: - Establish the Norwegian Science Index (NVI) with links to institutional archives - Initiate negotiations with publishers on national subscription and licensing agreements - Maintain NORA (Norwegian Open Research Archive), in the first instance for the current year

The Ministry of Education and Research should prioritise supporting further development and use of institutional archives. (This does not exclude publishing in Open Access journals.) To achieve this, institutions must have a conscious approach to quality and to what they wish to use their institutional archives for.

The group suggests that institutions can demand the deposition of scientific publications in the interests of transparency, retesting of results, and maintaining institutional records. The deposition of copies of published articles will not automatically lead to access The consent of the researcher is also required. The group believes that the majority of those who are asked to make their publications available will provide their consent, if they are well-informed, legal questions are answered and the proper infrastructure is in place.

The Norwegian Research Council in their board meeting January 2009 adopted "Research council principles of open access to scientific publications". The policy states that the Research council will mandate self archiving to the extent this does not infringe upon authors' or publishers' rights. This is "only" a policy, and how this will be implemented in practical terms remains to be seen

The government (Ministry of Eucation) presented 24 th of april 2009 a report to the parliament about research policies in general

The Norwegian government says: In principle all documents which are results of publicly financed research shall be available on internet free of charge The researchers do not have to publish in open access if the publisher says no

The government will support higher education institutions in their open access activities The government will make an action plan for support of open access activities