Open Access

The government has established national guidelines for Open Access that were launched August 22 2017; see the section “National goals and guidelines for Open Access to research articles” below for more information. Nord will set and adopt its own guidelines for Open Access – an Open Access policy – in accordance with the national guidelines.

What is Open Access?

  • Open Access (OA) means unrestricted online access to research output.
  • The author retains copyright, but gives the user permission to read, download, copy, distribute, search in, or link to the text without compensation.

 

Why Open Access?

  • The results of publicly funded research should be publicly available.
  • Solidarity with colleagues in poorer countries. The research is shared with those who cannot afford to buy access to it.
  • The Open Access citation advantage: “the well-documented phenomenon that OA articles are cited more often than non-OA articles” (Suber 2012:15).
  • Open Access can reduce the costs of scholarly publishing. Over two decades, from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s, the price of toll-access journals rose more than 2.5 times faster than inflation.

  • Important research funders require Open Access to (the results of) the research  wholly or partially funded by them. A few examples –

The Ministry of Education and Research (Kunnskapsdepartementet, KD):                           I tildelingsbrevet for 2014 (arkivref 2013/2550-3), avsnitt 4.1, krever KD at "institusjonene sørger for at alle vitenskapelige artikler som er helt eller delvis offentlig finansiert, enten publiseres åpent eller egenarkiveres etter avtale med utgiver, likevel slik at dette ikke kommer i konflikt med forskernes akademiske frihet til å velge de faglig foretrukne publiseringskanalene".

The Research Council of Norway:                        "The Research Council requires all scientific articles resulting from research wholly or partially funded by the Research Council to be openly accessible." […]

"If articles resulting from projects wholly or partially funded by the Research Council are not self-archived in accordance with these open access principles, the Research Council may withhold funding until the relevant articles are self-archived." (The Research Council's Principles for Open Access to Scientific Publications. Revised June 2014)

EU in the framework programme Horizon 2020:   "[F]ollowing Horizon 2020's open access policy, beneficiaries must ensure that peer-reviewed scientific publications resulting from Horizon 2020 funding are deposited in repositories and made open access i.e. free of charge online access for the user." (Work Programme 2014-2015 Part "Table of Contents and General Introduction": 19)

How to achieve Open Access

There are three routes to Open Access: gold, green and hybrid

1) gold Open Access:

  • Authors publish in pure Open Access journals which provide immediate free access to all of their articles on the journal website, e.g. – in PLOS ONE – Presslauer et al., 2014.
  • More than two-thirds (70%) of all peer-reviewed pure Open Access journals charge no fees.
  • The other peer-reviewed pure Open Access journals charge fees, often called Article Processing Charges: APCs. Corresponding authors from Nord University can apply to Nord University’s OA fund to cover APCs for publication in peer-reviewed pure Open Access journals...

2) green Open Access (self-archiving):

Keep/obtain the final manuscript you submitted to the journal!                 

"Clearly, if one wants to increase the chance of being highly cited, self-archiving in Green OA is the way to go […]". (Archambault et. al., 2014: 24)

When you register scientific publications you can easily make the full text available in CRIStin (Current Research Information System in Norway) by selecting "Deliver full-text document".  The user guide "Self-archiving", which explains how to upload full-text documents when registering articles in CRIStin, is available here. The guide is specifically for Nord University staff. Self-archiving is free. When you upload a full-text document to CRIStin, you must confirm that your co-authors have given consent for the document to be published electronically in Nord University's institutional archive Brage Nord. Ask your co-authors for consent  when you agree to work on an article together.

The University Library is responsible for checking/determining the copyright of Nord University employees’ articles and checking the publisher’s policy on self-archiving (in SHERPA/RoMEO). This includes determining whether a/which version of the article can be archived in Brage Nord. Archiving in Brage Nord provides secure storage of research. In addition, the research will be visible and searchable in search engines such as the academic database NORA (Norwegian Open Research Archive) and Google (Scholar).

Green OA: Authors publish in a traditional subscription-based journal and then self-archive a version of their article in their institutional repository, e.g. Brage Nord.

Most traditional subscription-based journals allow archiving of the final peer-reviewed author manuscript: the so called post-print, but not of the published version.

Typically, post-prints are the articles as published in terms of content, but not in terms of appearance, as publishers often reserve for themselves their own arrangement of type-setting and formatting. A post-print is a version without the journal's formatting (page numbers, volume etc.).

Illustrations and tables usually appear at the end of the manuscript (the post-print). Some post-prints:

3) hybrid Open Access:

  • Hybrid journals collect subscription fees and APCs ("double dipping").
  • These APCs are in average considerably higher than those paid to pure OA journals; cf. 1).
  • Nord University does not support payment of author fees to hybrid journals.

If you are in doubt as to whether a journal is a pure OA journal (1.) or a hybrid journal (3.) please contact the Library.

The OA fund

Guidelines for Nord University's OA fund

The University has an Open Access publishing fund. The fund is intended to cover author costs of publishing in pure Open Access journals. From November 29 2016, the fund can also cover costs for OA monographs and for articles/chapters in OA anthologies.

The following guidelines apply for applications to the fund.












1) Open Access journal articles

The main criteria  for support are:

  • The corresponding author must be affiliated with Nord University.
  • Funding is granted to pure gold Open Access journals only, not to hybrid journals where the author can pay a fee to an otherwise subscription-based journal to make an individual article Open Access.
  • The article has to be peer reviewed and accepted for publication.

See the complete guidelines (journal articles)!

If the journal article is accepted for publication, send the application form.

You will find information about payment alternatives here. 

                    

2) Open Access books

The main criteria for support are:

  • The corresponding author must be affiliated with Nord University.
  • Funding is granted to pure Open Access monographs or articles/chapters in pure Open Access anthologies.
  • The monograph/anthology must be published under a Creative Commons license.
  • The publisher must be ranked level 1 or 2 in NSD’s Database for Higher Education.
  • The publication – the monograph or the article/chapter in an anthology – must be peer reviewed.

See the complete guidelines (books)!

For anthologies and monographs, we have no application form.  Send an e-mail to openaccess@nord.no where you present your project or need.

National goals and guidelines for Open Access to research articles

These were launched August 22 2017. The government has established 4 national guidelines and 5 measures; see here, p. 2.

From the 4 guidelines:

1. Publicly funded scientific journal articles are to be made openly available (see guideline 1).

2. All publicly funded research articles must be deposited in a suitable academic repository such as Brage Nord. This shall Fact box body goes heretake place, irrespective of the publishing channel and when the article can be made openly available (see guideline 2).

From the 5 measures: «To contribute to a successful implementation of the guidelines, the government will: […]

2. Investigate how a national repository can be realised.

3. Introduce a requirement for articles to be deposited in a local or national repository in order to be counted in the performance based funding scheme.”