6.3 Science Belongs to Everyone – Open Access Measures in Helsinki University Library and the Finnish Literature Society 2014-2017
Creators: name: Alén, Niklas; Kuusela, Marjo
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2017
Subjects: Open Access, measures, Helsinki University Library, Finland

description: Open access in all of its forms is well established in Finnish academia. On a national level open access has been recognized as an important publishing practice by the Ministry of Education and Culture in its Open Science and Research Initiative. Most Finnish universities have their own institutional repositories, and many domestic scholarly journals have successfully transformed themselves to open access publications. The only part of the scholarly publishing ecosystem clearly lagging behind is monograph publishing. To remedy this situation the Helsinki University Library – implementing the University’s strategic plan 2017-2020 to make research results accessible to the academic community and society at large – and the Finnish Literature Society (SKS) have launched multiple programmes independently and in consort. In our paper we aim to bring forward the publisher’s and the library’s points of view in open access monograph publishing in the Finnish context. We will take a closer look at the library’s motives, challenges and workflow as well as finding sustainable practices for managing open access books by libraries. We will also examine open access monograph publishing through the lens of a publisher, the Finnish Literature Society. The SKS is a learned society founded in 1831. It is also Finland’s largest scholarly publisher in the field of the humanities. The SKS Open Science -project began its work in November 2014. It produced a report on open access monograph publishing in the national and international context in 2015. After the report the SKS launched its open access programme in 2016 as one of the first publishers in Finland. In December of 2015 the SKS and the Helsinki University Library began a pilot project to have 30 titles by Helsinki University scholars published in open access. The success of the library-publisher co-operation led to the development of the Aleksandria library consortium pilot. Aleksandria is an innovative funding mechanism for Finnish language scholarly monographs. It works very much along the lines of the international Knowledge Unlatched-consortium, but it’s adapted to fit the Finnish context. Throughout the pilot projects the stakeholders’ concerns related to OA monograph publishing have been explored. Our practical goal is to lower the barriers and facilitate OA publishing in Finland. For libraries OA monographs still represent tributaries rather than main stream, and the pilot’s goal is to accrue know-how and annex OA monographs from a separate silo to the library’s regular metadata and discovery work flows. New competencies needed by librarians were also mapped: informing authors of agreements, funder requirements, CC-licenses, OA-metrics, dissemination and discovery. During the pilot projects we also organize workshops (e.g. Books, Libraries and Open Access) concentrating on OA monograph funding models, discoverability, usage and metrics and library’s role in OA monograph field.