Sweden

The DRIVER Inventory Study found that there are approximately 19 universities that have digital repositories. According to the Swedish Agency of Higher Education there are 39 Higher Educational Institutes.
The Study reports a significant growth in repostories between 2002 and 2005 while the number of repositories publishing e-theses has grown from 13 to 16. Only four repositories publish articles, and two of these in significant numbers of over 500. The focus is mainly on original publishing of material.

With reference to institutional policies, the DRIVER Inventory Study states that the Swedish Association of Higher Education (SUHF) is an interesting organization for Swedish universities and university colleges. It signed the Berlin Declaration in 2004. This has been followed by strong policy statements from the universities of Lund and Stockholm. The Swedish Research Council signed the Berlin Declaration in 2005 and has highlighted Open Access in external communications.

Services created on top of the digital repositories:

There is a running service to harvest student theses using the OAI-PMH, Uppsök. There is a pilot service to harvest research e-publications from repositories supporting metadata recommendations from the SVEP project (qualified Dublin Core) called Testsök .

Technical infrastructure and technical issues:

Contributions to the DRIVER Inventory Study state that in 2000, Uppsala University Library received financial support from the university to develop a repository software of its own, the DiVA software package. From an early stage it offered other universities the possibility to run their e-publishing on DiVA on the condition that they co-financed the further development of DiVA and certain running costs.

The DiVA consortium today includes 15 Swedish universities and university colleges plus one Nordic participant.
Other universities chose to implement available Open Source software, primarily ePrints, but recently also DSpace. Still others continued to develop their local solutions and in some cases also made these OAI- compliant.
There are at present 7 repositories using GNU EPrints, including three from the same institution (SLU). There are two DSpace installations on the web and two more coming up.

The number of OAI compatible repositories has risen in recent years and it is still growing. The Swedish Association of Higher Education (SUHF) and the Swedish Research Council have signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access. The Association of Swedish Higher Education has also recommended to its members to implement key points of the Berlin Declaration in terms of implementing a policy to require their researchers to deposit a copy of all their published articles in an open access repository and encouraging their researchers to publish their research articles in open access journals where a suitable journal exists and provide the support to enable that to happen.

The Swedish Research Council is taking steps towards a mandate that Council funded research should be published in Open Access. The Lund University Library Head Office is assisting the Research Council in preparing the mandate.

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