Kungliga Biblioteket

The National Library of Sweden (NL) combines the mission of a “traditional” national library with that of a national library authority. Promoting open access essentially concerns the accessibility of Swedish research publications and thus fits very well with other tasks of national libraries, such as maintaining national bibliographic services, receiving legal deposit of and providing long-term access to digital documents. In 2010 the NL Sweden adopted an open access policy covering several fields of activity. 

NL Sweden coordinates and is the main funder of a national  programme – OpenAccess.se. The programme was first implemented during 2006−09 in partnership with Swedish university libraries, with the Association of Swedish Higher Education, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Swedish Research Council, and the Swedish Knowledge Foundation.

After a favorable evaluation by international experts in 2009 it was then transformed into a permanent programme. The national library has involved the former partners and some new bodies - a funder (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond) and an OA publisher - to participate in the steering committe. The steering organization of the programme has been enlarged with two new working groups mainly populated by active repository managers.

The programme OpenAccess.se promotes open access to the works produced by researchers, teachers and students by supporting open access publishing - OA repositories and OA journals - at Swedish institutions of higher education. The programme has three action lines:

- information and advice

- coordination of policy

- development of infrastructure and services

The programme lays more stress on information about open access to Swedish researchers, who now will have to respond to recent OA mandates from research funders and universities. As a consequence the official website www.openaccess.se has been radically refocused towards having researchers and the general public as its core audience. This is also coordinated with the NL Sweden being the National Open Access Desk of the EU project OpenAIRE. The “inside” information for the Swedish open access community is now available on a more informal website, based on blog software. This site is open for direct participation from the community, but still run by the NL Sweden and linked to the official website. 

Open access policy issues is another major theme. The Ministry of Education and Research announced at the Meetingplace Open Access meeting in November 2009 that it was going to formulate a national OA policy.  Discussions have been initiated with the Ministry on how to implement this, and the steering committee of the programme has sent a formal proposal to the Ministry arguing for a national policy and giving suggestions about its general outline. The programme also has also been active in organizing a dialogue between funders and higher education institutions about open access. 

Finally the programme continues to support the development of infrastructure and user services, building on earlier work. Repositories have to be user friendly and keep a high quality, new kinds of content have to be accommodated, the support for Open Access journals in Sweden should be strengthened and coordinated. The development of services will now more than ever have to unfold within the framework of an international infrastructure for Open Access repositories.