RECENT OPEN ACCESS DEVELOPMENTS IN FINLAND

The Finnish Council of University Rectors signs the Berlin declaration
New open access initiatives are begun

May 23, 2006

The Finnish Council of University Rectors has, in its meeting today, decided to sign the Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. The council is a non-governmental association representing the heads of all 21 Finnish universities. In this occasion, it is important to point out also the more concrete open access activities in Finland.

In April 2006, an initiative was started for the advancement of open access activities in Finland, funded by the Ministry of Education. The project, known as OA-JES, is coordinated by the Finnish Open Access Working Group, FinnOA. It is a collaboration between the University of Helsinki, Helsinki University of Technology, the National Library of Finland, and the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies (TSV).

The objectives of the initiative are: 1) to give aid to universities and research institutes in setting up institutional repositories; 2) to inform researchers about how open access is a part of the research process; and 3) to provide an easy-to-use platform for the open access journals of Finnish learned societies.

The Ministry of Education will also be funding a digital infrastructure initiative in the centre campus the University of Helsinki, starting in 2007. In the centre campus are situated the faculties of arts, behavioural sciences, law, social sciences, and theology.

The aims will be twofold: 1) to support scholarly open access publishing, which will include repository services both for researchers and for scholarly journals of the departments, and 2) to build a supportive infrastructure for the accessibility and preservation of primary research materials of the departments. The idea is to provide faculty with a comprehensive set of services for own publications and research materials.

These activities are a concrete manifestation of the recommendations of the Open Access Publishing Committee, issued by the ministry in 2005 (PDF).

Contact Information:
Mr Kalle Korhonen
OA-JES initiative, Finnish Open Access Working Group
e-mail: kalle.korhonen at helsinki.fi

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