Countries

Norway has adopted national guidelines for Open Access and the Norwegian Research Council has established policies for Open Data.

In 2017 the Norwegian government publicly announced national goals and guidelines for Open Access to research publications.

The goal is that all publicly funded research should be made openly available by 2024. To achieve this the Norwegian government has established specific guidelines and measures. For more, please click here. 

All Norwegian universities and most research performing university colleges have Open Access policies in place. In general, policies are focused on self-archiving and depositing publications in institutional repositories. For more, please click here.

The main research funder in Norway, The Norwegian Research Council (NRC), established an Open Access policy in 2009, which was updated in 2015. It states that scientific publications based on projects funded by NRC are to be made openly accessible in a repository with an embargo of no more than 6 or 12 months for STM and SSH respectively. In order to stimulate Open Access publishing NRC will cover up to 50% of the costs for institutional APC funds, in a program called STIM-OA. For more, please click here.

The University of Malta is collaborating with the Malta Council for Science and Technology (MCST) and other national stakeholders to compile a National Open Science Policy for Malta.
Open Access to scientific publications has been placed on the Government’s agenda and Malta has submitted an application for support under the H2020 Policy Support Facility so as to implement a National Open Access Policy.

PluMTri (Platform for Maltese Research and Innovation).

On the 14th of December 2015, Luxembourg’s research institutions all signed and adopted the following common principles on Open Access which provide an overarching framework for individual research institution policies on Open Access. Please note that individual institution policies on Open Access may include more specific conditions.

1. Dissemination of research results through publication is an integral part of the research activity.
2. Publicly-funded research outputs must be dessiminated via high-quality, peer-reviewed publications, and opportunities to make results available in Open Access must be maximised.
3. Nationally funded research outputs should be published with a CC-BY attribution licence6, allowing the information to be copied and reused.
4. Peer reviewed journal articles and other research outputs resulting in whole or in part from publicly-funded research shall be deposited in an Open Access repository and made publicly discoverable, accessible and re-usable as soon as possible and on an on-going basis. The chosen repository must enable authors and institutions to easily comply with legal deposit laws and provide comprehensive publication metadata to digital libraries.
5. Researchers may choose any of the valid approaches to Open Access. They are encouraged to exclusively select routes where quality is ensured and double-dipping7 is avoided.
6. Repositories shall release the metadata immediately upon deposit. Open access to the full text paper should be made immediately upon deposit or upon the publication date at the latest. Access restrictions to the full text article may be applied as required by certain publishers, however these embargoes should not normally exceed six months for scientific, technical and health science research publications and 12 months for arts, humanities and social sciences research outputs.
7. Long-term digital preservation of publications as well as long-term access to them will be guaranteed by the National Library of Luxembourg, due to its legal obligation of preservation of the country’s published materials.

The FNR has recently introduced a new mandatory Open Access policy for any publications from FNR (co-)funded projects granted after 1 January 2017 (exception: monographs). Publications from project funds awarded prior to that date are recommended to be Open Access, but it is not mandatory.

Latvia has not implemented a national Open Access/Open Science policy yet. However, several actions and initiatives to implement principles of Open Access/Open Science policies are taking place in Latvia.

The participation of the University of Latvia in OpenAIRE projects has resulted with the establishment of the National Open Access Desk – Latvia which serves as the main information point for support on Open Access and Open Science in Latvia. 

In late 2019 the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Latvia initiated the Open Science Latvia landscape research with one of the main aims to create a roadmap of the Open Science policy.

On September in 2019, the EOSC Nordic project was launched to promote the implementation of the EOSC in the Nordic and Baltic countries. Latvia is represented in the project by Riga Technical University.

OA policies are at an early stage in Latvia; In 2017 two universities, the University of Latvia and Riga Technical University adopted institutional policies. In both policies, it is recommended (not mandatory) that researchers provide Open Access to their publications and other research outputs.

Latvian institutions have two policies:

• Open Access Policy of University of Latvia
• Open Access Policy of Riga Technical University

In October 2013 a new law was approved by the Parliament on cultural assets. The Decree -Law“ Urgent provisions for the protection, enhancement and promotion of cultural assets, activities and tourism (13G00135) (G.U No. 186 of 09.08.2013) released on August 9 2013 and converted in law on October 7 2013 (L. 112 /2013) states that results of research, funded at least 50 % with public funds and published in scholarly journals (whose frequency is at least biannual) should be open access.

According to this law, all public research funders and administrators of public research funds are required to take provisions to implement and promote OA according to the principles stated in the law.

In line with the EU recommendations to State members on access to and preservation of scientific information, with the new Italian Law on OA (L. 112 /2013) and with the OA-CRUI guidelines on OA policy, 24 universities out of 97 adopted institutional OA mandates and many others are in the process of approving them (as of October 2017).

Large national funded research institutions or publicly funded medium or small research centres have not yet approved any policy with the exception of the ISS – Istituto Superiore di Sanità (the main research institution on health science funded by the Public Health Ministry), and the INGV (National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology). However, the main national funded research institutions (ISS, INGV, ENEA, INFN) together with CRUI support OA in principle and committed themselves to take action in the near future by signing the Position Statement on the Open Access to Research Results in March 2013. In particular, INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare/National Institute for Nuclear Physics) is playing a leading role in the OA field with its participation in the SCOAP3 initiative.

In January 2014 the Ministry of Education, Universities and Research mandated OA for publications and datasets arising from the funding programme for young scientists (Bando SIR Scientific Independence for young scientists programme D. D. 23/01/14 n. 17). According to the mandate, data and peer-reviewed articles must be deposited no later than the time of publication, and must be available in OA no later than six months from the date of publication in scientific, technical and medical fields and no later than 12 months from the date of publication in the social sciences and humanities.

In 2015 and 2017 the research funding programme Bandi PRIN financed by MIUR mandates open access to publications resulting from the funding programme in line with the law (L. 112 /2013).

Two private research funders, Telethon and Fondazione Cariplo adopted a funded OA mandate respectively in 2010 and 2012.

There is no national policy on Open Science in Iceland but OA has been endorsed through government statements in the past.

The three universities in the country have their own institutional Open Access policy encouraging the academic staff to publish scholarly articles in open access and make them accessible free of charge and free of licencing restrictions.

The Icelandic Center for Research, Rannís issued an open access policy in 2003 with later amendments. Researchers who receive funding shall make their research finding available either through publishing in OA journals or depositing a post-print version in repositories. For more, please see here.

Pursuant to Act LXXVI of 2014 on scientific research, development and innovation, the National Research Infrastructure Committee assists the National Research, Development and Innovation Office in the fulfilment of its public functions aimed at the sustainable development of the domestic RDI infrastructure.
The National Research Infrastructure Committee is responsible for mapping the domestic research infrastructure, assessing development needs, planning cooperation with foreign research infrastructures and continuously monitoring effectiveness in the relevant fields of science and research.
Taking all this into consideration, and adhering to the Roadmap of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI), it submits a proposal on the development of the domestic research infrastructure in the framework of the Hungarian National Roadmap. For more, please click here.