Category Archives: oa.scandinavia

VISION FOR NORDIC OPEN SCIENCE DATA COLLABORATION

Posted on by
Reply

“The Nordic countries are at a major crossroads in the evolution of knowledge. Digitalisation and the green shift are at the top of the EU’s research and innovation policy agenda, paralleling the Nordic Council of Ministers’ new vision for the Nordic Region to become the world’s most sustainable and integrated region by 2030. Open science¹ and data sharing will be a pillar in the concrete work to be undertaken in moving the hotbed of research and innovation towards the Nordic Region, as acknowledged in the Nordic Council of Ministers’ Ministerial Declaration Digital North 2.0. The vision of a European Open Science Cloud is forcefully supported by the Nordic and Baltic countries through the EOSC-Nordic project.

With its traditions of cooperation and culture of openness, the Nordic Region now has an unprecedented opportunity to take the lead and become a universal role model in open science and innovation, paralleling the Pact for Research and Innovation in Europe. Digital solutions for example in secure and ethical sharing of health data will save lives and simpler access to climate data will broaden the knowledge base for political decision-making related to global climate change.

We agree that enhanced Nordic collaboration on open science will improve the research system, boost innovation, and promote a wide range of future collaborative efforts in the Nordic Region as well as internationally. We believe that enhanced collaboration can be achieved through long-term engagement of the designated national organisations in the structured collaboration of the Nordic Council of Ministers and its institutions….”

Study of the Nordic SSH Journal Publishing Landscape

Posted on by
Reply

“The results of the bibliometric study reveal that the landscape of Nordic journals in SSH is diverse, with strong presence of both professional publishers and universities publishing journals. 75% of the journals publish all their content open access (OA) immediately, with a further 4% doing so after a delay. The open source editorial management software Open Journal Systems (OJS) was being used by at least 42% of the journals. Though the web survey only received a limited number of responses it provides indication that many journals function with sparse resources, rely on volunteer work to a high degree, and would like to see long-term funding opportunities for journals to develop….

The Nordic journal publishing space is very much in a state of change, driven both by the Nordic countries having national OA policies but also factors that relate to consolidation that has been happening in the broader international journal publishing space as well as technology maturity of open source software to support modern journal functions. A large proportion of Nordic SSH journals are run with low direct monetary funding, relying heavily on volunteer effort and in-kind support from universities, making their operations sensitive to even small changes in editorial membership or organizational support…. 

There has been a distinct movement towards collaborating with international commercial publishers among journals that reach outside of national scope, a change that often is accompanied by a name change and English-only publishing. Such journals are also often subscription-based while the rest of Nordic journals are more commonly OA. However, there is also another movement where universities and national journal portals publish journals on modern OJS-driven platforms and in such cases retain multilingualism in content. It would be important to align funding opportunities with this trend, allowing for cost-efficient OA journals to reach higher levels of operational and financial stability without necessarily involving a professional publisher…”

NOS-HS | Promoting Nordic research within the humanities and social sciences

Posted on by
Reply

The Nordic publications Committee for Humanities and Social Science Periodicals (NOP-HS) commissioned a study of the Nordic journal landscape. The study and report have been prepared by Associate Professor Mikael Laakso from Hanken School of Economics.

The report provides a comprehensive overview of the landscape of Nordic scholarly journals in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH).

Scandinavian universities perform dismally at reporting clinical trial results

Posted on by

“Universities across Finland, Norway and Sweden have failed to upload the results of hundreds of clinical trials onto the EU Clinical Trial Register, in violation of EU transparency rules….”

Open access journal publishing in the Nordic countries

Posted on by

Abstract:  The number of open access (OA) journals and their share of all scholarly journals are usually estimated based on indexing in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). DOAJ’s coverage of OA journals from different regions of the world is, however, far from complete, particularly of journals publishing in languages other than English. Using alternative data sources for identification and manual verification, 437 scholarly OA journals published in the five Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden) were identified, and some key characteristics were studied. Of these, only 184 were indexed in DOAJ. A vast majority of the journals was published by scholarly societies or universities. Social sciences and humanities dominated as topics, and few journals charge authors. National or university-specific OJS portals have played a major role in enabling OA publishing. Around a third of the Nordic scholarly journals are currently OA.

Kotilava – Finnish academic journals towards immediate Open Access | Kotilava

Posted on by

“In their joint effort, Kotilava, The Federation of Finnish Learned Societies and The National Library of Finland support Finnish scholarly journals in their transition to immediate Open Access. This project, being a part of the Open Science and Research Initiative in Finland (ATT), proceeds via two subprojects. First, the platform for editing and publishing OA journals are improved. Second, a new consortium based funding model for Finnish OA journals will be created….”

Open Science and Research

Posted on by

“The Ministry of Education and Culture of Finland promotes research information availability and open science through the Open Science and Research Initiative (ATT), which is set out for the years 2014-2017. The objective is for Finland to become one of the leading countries in openness of science and research by the year 2017 and to ensure that the possibilities of open science will be widely utilized in our society. In addition to this, the ambition is to promote the trustworthiness of science and research, support the culture of open science in the way of acting within the research community, and to increase the societal and social impressiveness of research and science….”