– The cooperation between funders and universities is an important step towards the goal of 100 percent open access for publicly funded research, says Wilhelm Widmark, Library Director at Stockholm University and vice Chair of the Bibsam consortium’s steering committee.

The agreement is the first of its kind, and is in line with the National Library’s recommendation that the costs of open access publications should be shared between research funding organisations and HEIs. The recommendation originates from one of the studies on open access by the National Library that was handed over to the government this spring.

The research funding organisations Swedish Research Council, Formas, Forte and Vinnova are paying 50 percent of the costs, and the other 50 percent are paid for by the 31 HEIs involved in the agreement, where Stockholm University is one of them.

The agreement covers more than 500 full open access journals from BioMed Central, SpringerOpen, Nature Research and Palgrave Macmillan. For the individual researcher, this means that you can publish open access in these journals completely free of charge during the period July 2019 - December 2021.

– The cost of publishing in these OA journals are already paid for today, but this is one way of getting a better overview of the expenditures and reduce the researchers’ administration. The agreement implicates cost efficiency for the entire consortium, says Wilhelm Widmark.

Imprints included in the agreement:

More information

Read more about the agreement (for researchers at Stockholm University)

"This is only the beginning" – read the press release from the National Library where Astrid Söderbergh Widding, President of Stockholm University and Chair of the Bibsam consortium’s steering committee, speaks about the agreement

Read more about Open Access at Stockholm University

Read more about centrally funded and discounted article processing charges

Questions?

Please get in touch with the library at  openaccess@su.se!