Unit is negotiating and managing 39 licence agreements on behalf of Norwegian research libraries from the public sector. The agreements focus on access to electronic resources such as e-journals, reference databases, dictionaries and encyclopedias.
Unit is national coordinator for the work with open access in Norway.
Open access
The political foundation for open access in Norway is based on
- The Norwegian government's national guidelines for open access to scientific articles (2017)
- Universities Norway’s Expression of support for a common negotiating strategy for open access to research articles (2018)
- The European Research Funds 'Plan S', which the Research Council of Norway has joined (2018)
Background
Norwegian institutions pay more than 330 million NOK annually to publishers for reading access to scholarly articles, included those published by researchers at Norwegian institutions. It is therefore a demand that publicly funded research should be freely accessible to all.
Negotiation principles
In 2018, Unit is negotiating with 11 publishers, among them Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis and SpringerNature.
Common principles for the negotiations are
- The articles with corresponding authors from Norway shall be openly available at the time of publishing
- Publishing open access shall not increase total costs
- License agreements, costs and business models must be fully transparent
- Perpetual access to content published in subscription journals must be granted
- Agreements should demonstrate a move towards models where costs are related to the volume of Norwegian institutions article publishing output