The Swiss National Strategy on Open Access and its Action Plan

"A year ago, the action plan for the Swiss National Strategy on Open Access has been approved by the plenary assembly of swissuniversities (https://www.swissuniversities.ch/en/) and has been subsequently endorsed by the governing board of the Swiss University Conference. Swiss Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are the key players in the implementation process of the national strategy, so the aim of the action plan was to provide them with options and concrete solutions to achieve the objectives that came with adopting the strategy. ...

According to the “Vision 2024” underlying the national strategy, all scholarly publications resulting from publicly funded research must be freely available on the internet and, moreover, that all scholarly publications in Switzerland should be 100% Open Access within a landscape of mixed Open Access models by 2024. The proposed approaches to implement this vision have been formulated with respect to predefined guiding principles such as pursuing a powerful and unified approach while having complete cost transparency and cost neutrality in the long term. All stakeholders have to join forces in order to realize the objectives. This is especially important considering the decentralized education and research system of Switzerland.

National contract negotiations with the major publishers Springer Nature, Wiley and Elsevier under the auspices of swissuniversities are significant action items regarding a unified approach. The focus of the negotiation strategy will be on the “Read & Publish” model as a favoured negotiation approach with the goal to gain transparent pricing and greater accessibility to publications (see also the factsheet for details)...."