Mounting pressure to implement Open Access in Nordic countries — NordForsk

"There is widespread agreement that the results of publicly financed research should no longer be hidden behind hard paywalls, and new initiatives are constantly being introduced to change this practice. One of the initiatives is that The Nordic Council of Ministers has commissioned a report on Open Access ... The alternative is Open Access publishing, which has received backing in principle from a variety of government organisations: the EU Commission, governments of Nordic countries and the rest of Europe, national research councils, and more. With Open Access, researchers retain the intellectual property rights to their own material. Scientific articles published in online journals such as Plos One are freely available to anyone who is interested.  But opposition to this is strong. Lisbeth Söderquist, analyst in the Department of Research Policy at the Swedish Research Council, along with a number of other speakers, pointed out during the workshop that the current system for evaluating researchers is at odds with the push for Open Access. Specifically, the evaluation of researchers for promotion and permanent employment is based on the scientific journals in which they have been published, and at present it is the commercial journals that have the highest impact factor. Researchers who only publish in Open Access journals may slow their own careers; thus, achieving greater use of Open Access will require the development of new methods for evaluating researcher merits ..."