Finland

There are approximately 20 universities in Finland, seven of which have a digital repository and most of them have only recently been set up. The main focus of the coverage lies on the grey literature: reports and theses. Only one digital repository focuses on research articles from peer-reviewed journals.

In 2006, a national project funded by the Ministry of Education aimed at promoting institutional repositories among the universities. There is a growing interest and enthusiasm and a need for advocacy to promote Open Access. The main driving factor behind the building of digital repositories is to preserve the research output of the institute.

The national library plays traditionally a very important central role. With regard to institutional repositories, this has led to a debate on whether there should be one national repository or whether each institution should maintain its own institutional repository.

The Rectors' Council of the Finnish Universities signed the Berlin Declaration on 18 October 2007. The Ministry of Education issued its memorandum of recommendations for the promotion of open access in scientific publishing in Finland in March, 2005. There is an English summary available while the memorandum itself has been translated into English. These recommendations are addressed to funding agencies, higher education institutions and research institutes, journals and learned societies, libraries, and to the ministry itself.

The Finnish Open Access Working Group, FinnOA , was founded in 2003. It includes librarians and faculty members. FinnOA has organized various seminars in Finland which have attracted notable audiences. The target groups have been librarians; scholarly journal publishers; and faculty members. In 2006, the working group coordinated an initiative called OA-JES (Promotion of Open Access Publishing in Finland). The initiative consisted of four main goals: advocacy; coordination of repositories; OA journal platform for Finnish scholarly journals; and support for repositories by the National Library. The Finnish Open Access working group is currently engaged in trying to improve the status of emerging cross-disciplinary journals, the editorial boards of which have realised the importance of open access which are published by university departments, not by scholarly societies.

The DRIVER wiki may be a useful source of further information.

Are there developments in this country that you would like to inform the DRIVER community about? If so, please visit the DRIVER wiki. There you will find guest editors' contributions to the countries pages. Information about the easy process of editing pages and how to obtain a password can be found on the wiki under "PmWiki Software". We look forward to your visit.

Last updated: 14-Nov-2008