Open Access in the Finnish Universities of Applied Sciences

Abstract: "The universities of applied sciences in Finland have decided together to create a digital repository for theses and research publications during the years 2008-2009, http://www.theseus.fi. The aim is to apply open access principles and use open source solutions. The authentication to the theseus.fi service uses Shibboleth software, the publications will be licensed with Creative Commons and the platform for the service will be open source technology based DSpace. The essential goals in this project - as in all digital library services - are accessibility, user-friendliness, flexibility and transformality. The Open Access Project. The ministry of education in Finland and 26 universities of applied sciences found the project together. The main objective of the project is to promote open access publishing among the collaborating universities. The joint venture consists of two parts: The web journal osaaja.net applies the academic form of publishing and utilizes the peer-review process. Osaaja.net is published on Open Journal Systems -platform and is available for authors and readers also in English. Theseus.fi repository will digitally store and make available the 20.000 theses annually that are produced in Finnish universities of applied sciences. The purpose of is to solve the problems of access, storage and preservation with a user friendly way. The repository exploits the DSpace platform provided by the National Library of Finland who is also responsible of the technical implementation of theseus.fi. CSC - Finnish IT Center for Science. The students will upload the thesis to the repository. The self-archiving requires electronic authentication that will be carried out under the identity federation of the Finnish universities and research institutions. The Haka-federation uses Shibboleth open source standard and is operated by the CSC. Users, students and teachers, are able to access the services using a single user account and password. User identities are provided by the users home organizations. Creative Commons Finland. The publishing system will create automatically a copyright information page with responding metadata for every published work. Creative Commons licenses are used by default as they provide free and easy way to express the rights that are granted with the work. The copyright information page is used also to further define the license terms in cases where CC-licenses need clarification. The attachment of legal metadata serves wide dissemination of works by creating clear legal rules for sharing the work but at the same time respects the authors' copyrights. Arene ry, Amkit Consortium, CSC, Ministry of education in Finland, Seinäjoki University of applied sciences."