Norway: Open Online Access to Research

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

This is a brief report on the Norwegian Council for Higher Education
conference on Open Online Access to Research which took place a few days
ago in Oslo: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/oslo.htm

Norway, a nation of about 4.5 million people, 4 principal research
universities (Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim, Tromso), and an annual research
output of about 10,000 refereed research journal articles is a microcosm
of the world's research access/impact status quo. It is small, but
representative, and, most important, it is autonomous and in a position to
take action in a way that will serve as an example to other nations.

IF it should actually become the first nation to *implement* the Berlin
Declaration (rather than merely endorse it, as other nations have so far
done), mandating open-access provision for all Norwegian research output,
Norway could trigger at last the long-awaited cascade of the open-access
dominoes: http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/berlin.htm

Norway has not yet implemented the Berlin Declaration, nor even decided at
this meeting to do so. But all the key causal pieces as well as the will
to make a way seemed to be in place at this national meeting, with
representatives of the government, of the administrative and academic
heads of the universities, of the research funding councils, of the
library and information science community, and of the research community,
nationwide. The next step will be national discussions of potential
nationwide Norwegian implementation. Those discussions may come to naught
(as other plans, elsewhere, have come to naught in the past), or they just
might come to fruition. Norway is small, independent, self-contained, and
determined. At least so it seemed to my ears, at this conference.

Present also was an important representative of Norway's nordic neighbour,
Sweden, in the person of Lars Bjornshauge, the director of the Lund
University Libraries http://www.lub.lu.se/headoffice/staff/larsbj.html
which is the active host not only of the Lund University Eprints Archives
-- one of the largest and most active university eprint archives and
programs for self-archiving university research output
http://lu-research.lub.lu.se/information.html http://eprints.lub.lu.se/ --
but also host of the associated OSI/BOAI-sponsored and widely used
Directory of Open Access Journals http://www.doaj.org/

So one can hope that if Norway does prove to be the first
Berlin-Declaration domino, the other nordic nations might be the next!

Just to make it clear what implementing (as opposed to merely endorsing)
the Berlin Declaration really means: (There have been misunderstandings
lately, to the effect that it merely means trying to require journal
publishers to make their contents open access six months after
publication! That is *not* what the Berlin Declaration says or means,
though one could be excused for getting lost in its excessive verbiage!)
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/berlin.htm

What the Berlin Declaration says, in essence, is that (1) open online
access should be provided to all research output and that (2) all research
output should be deposited in an open-access archive. The Berlin
Declaration is neutral about how the open-access is provided -- whether by
the journal, becoming an open-access journal and depositing its own
contents in an open-access archive, or by the author/institution, by
self-archiving their toll-access journal articles in their own
institutional open-access archives.

The Berlin Declaration says "should" and "should" is merely a
recommendation. The difference between endorsing the Berlin Declaration --
as all the Max-Planck Societies in Germany, the CNRS in France, and others
have done -- and *implementing* the Berlin Declaration, is that in an
implementation (whether institutional or national), the "should" becomes
"must" as a matter of (institutional or national) policy.  
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/harnad/

There is nothing shocking about "must" in this area. There is already a
"must" policy in place everywhere, and it is called "publish or perish."
This universal publish-or-perish policy in the research world has
naturally evolved in recent years from merely a publication count to a
*weighted* publication count, the number of publications being weighted by
their citation impact: "publish impactfully or perish." To implement the
Berlin Declaration would accordingly be for an institution or nation to
extend publish-impactfully-or-perish just a little further, to "maximise
publication-impact through open-access" (by either publishing the article
in an open-access journal or by self-archiving the article published in a
toll-access journal).

Will Norway have the historic role of becoming the first nation to do so?

Stevan Harnad