The UiOs open acceess policy is clear. We would like to see an increasing fraction of the scientific articles published in gold open access journals. If this is not possible, green open access is the solution - although we clearly see the double dipping challenge involved.
We made a change of policy last year. All articles from 2017 onwards should be uploaded to the institutional repository via Cristin. The figure above clearly shows that this change of policy has had immediate effect. In 2016 around 1100 articles were uploaded. That number was almost tripled in 2017. More than 3000 articles were uploaded. This is a remarkable improvement, and we are indeed grateful. I would like to thank the researchers, research administrative staff, and librarians who have been working to achieve this!
Still, a large number of articles were not uploaded. Hence, we have not reached our goal, and we need to work actively to increase the share of uploaded articles at UiO. Here is my request to you – take part in the Open Access “dugnad” at UiO, upload all your scientific articles from 2017 and onwards in Cristin! If you are lacking motivation, I would argue that this sharing of results is the very essence of research. The results of our research must be made available to society.
This view is also reflected in the EU-system as well as in the Norwegian Government’s new policy. All scientific articles based on publicly funded research should be made available in a suitable repository. Only in exceptional cases should articles based on public funding be published in journals that do not allow the articles to be archived and shared from a scientific repository.
The Norwegian Research Council has a corresponding open access policy, and require that all peer-reviewed scientific articles based on research fully or partly funded by the research council, are made available in institutional or disciplinary archives, such as “DUO Vitenarkiv” at UiO. Lack of compliance with this requirement can result in funds being held back.
The government also seems willing to put economic muscles behind their demands. They are consideering to modify the RBO-model and make uploading of articles to repositories a prerequisite to count in the performance-based funding system. Their ambition seems to be to introduce this change starting with articles from 2019.
At the University of Oslo, we emphasize in our policy that publishing Open Access must be done in accordance with the principles of academic freedom, which give the employees the exclusive right to choose the journals where they publish their scientific work. Still, we should not be to conservative. The open access idea was generated bottom-up in the research community. Now we need to deliver.
I finish by repeating my challenge to all the researchers at UiO - take part in the Open Access “dugnad”, and upload all your scientific articles from 2017 and onwards in Cristin!
Status open access - papers financed in part by NFR. Total numbers pr faculty.
