Successful Nordic cooperation in developing OA Journals

The project Aiding Scientific Journals Towards Open Access Publishing (NOAP) is now finished and has a wealth of interesting results to report.

Open Journal Systems

During the the project period the open source software Open Journal Systems (OJS) became the dominant OA journal publishing system in the Nordic countries.

The project made an inventory of Nordic journals using OJS and translated OJS to Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish.

In March 2010 it arranged a hands-on workshop in using OJS for journal editors and hosts that received great interest.  As a result of the project a Nordic OJS user group has been established. 

Economic models

The project has made surveys and tests of economic models for present OA journals in the Nordic countries. It has looked into Author-pays and Hybrid models for Open Access and reported a case study of a central university fund for OA publishing fees. 

Other activities

Copyright practice among nordic scientific journals has been studied and reported.

A case study has been made of the conversion to Open Access of a well established Finnish scientific journal in combination with retrodigitization.

The project has contributed to publish The Online Guide to Open Access Journals Publishing as an interactive web site connected to the Directory of Open Access Journals.

Results of the project have been communicated by the website,  by a Nordic one-day seminar with a large audience in November 2009 by the the practical workshop mentioned above

Target results

The desired target results of the project were:

• Analysis of significant issues when scientific journals consider and execute a transition to Open Access publishing, and presentation of such analyses and the ensuing recommendations in written and electronic media
• Improvements in the computational infrastructure for operating a journal in Open Access mode, and analysis of its ramifications 
• Creation of a network of stakeholders in Open Access publishing in the Nordic countries
• Strengthening Nordic university libraries and other university units in their publishing efforts and in their efforts to inform about this.
  

Funding

The project as a whole was funded by the Nordbib programme. The Swedish partners also had co-funding from the National Library of Sweden and the Swedish Research Council through the Open Access.se programme.

Report

The final report describes the results in different areas and presents a bibliography of publications by the participants as well as available presentations on NOAP workshops.
The Final report