Our Goals
Open access to information for all
The central goal of the FinELib consortium is immediate open publishing of scholarly publications. This goal is in the line with Plan S of the cOAlition S science financiers. The objective of Plan S is immediately openly available scholarly publications since the year 2021 with wide re-use rights. Immediate open availability is an objective also in the Finnish research community’s executive plan Open access to scholarly publications.
Anybody can read openly published articles in the network. Openness gives visibility to research and researchers: search engines will find open articles well and the probability of references increases. Openness accelerates the development of science and brings the research results fast and effectively into use for everybody.
Terms of use to advance research
It is important that articles have clear and easy to understand terms of use, whether they are openly available or behind a paywall. The user rights of articles published in journals requiring a subscription are defined in license agreements. The user rights of open access articles can be defined using Creative Commons licenses.
In its negotiations, the aim of FinELib is that publishers commit to offering Creative Commons CC BY license for open access publishing, required, as a rule, by Plan S. CC BY license allows articles to, e.g., be shared and modified on condition that proper references are made to the original article and any changes are highlighted.
The terms of use for the articles published behind paywall are defined in license agreements. FinELib’s Licencing principles determine key terms and conditions for the resources behind paywall. These include, among others, the right to use the licensed full text resources for text and data mining and for scientific communication. This enables sharing individual articles with other researchers who do not have access.
The terms of use regarding e-resources negotiated by FinELib are available online.
Reasonable costs
Finnish universities and research institutions spend millions of euros on access rights to scholarly e-journals. At the same time, the budgets of these organizations have even decreased. If the gap between costs and budget trends continues to widen, these organizations will no longer be able to provide their researchers with broad access to scholarly e-journals. Therefore, negotiations focus on costs and keeping them under control.
Currently, many highly valued scholarly journals collect both subscription fees and a separate APC, if a researcher wants to publish open access. This expensive mechanism decelerates the increase in open access publishing and is not in the best interests of the scientific community.
FinELib negotiates transformative agreements in order to move rapidly towards open publishing without extra costs to the scientific community. The purpose of transformative agreements is that the total costs do not rise during the transition towards open publishing. Publishing costs should be covered by license fees. Furthermore, the costs must be transparent, and the standards and processes of open publishing must be developed.
In the future, the publishers will be paid for open publishing services and the paywalls of scientific journals will disappear.
Openness as a national and EU-level goal
- Federation of Finnish Learned Societies coordinates open scholarship nationally in Finland with funding from the Ministry of Education and Culture.
- The EU’s Open Science Policy.
- FinELib is a member of the international OA2020 Project. Its goal is to accelerate the transition of current subscription journals to open access.
- FinELib promotes the principles of the Open Access negotiations of LIBER, the Association of European Research Libraries.
- FinELib participates in the work of the European University Association to advance open access.
Goals and negotiations regarding open access in other countries:
- Science funders commit to open science: PlanS.
- The negotiation and agreement site and national open access plan of the Netherlands: National Plan Open Science.
- DEAL konsortium of Germany.
- Open access goals of Norway: National goals and guidelines for open access to research articles.
- The Bibsam Consortium carries out open access negotiations in Sweden.
- OPEN ACCESS SERVICE RANGE OF JISC, an organisation that supports universities and the scientific community in the UK.
Take advantage of open access benefits
During negotiations, open access benefits have been agreed upon regarding the journals of the following publishers.
More information about publisher- and organisation-specific open access benefits is also available from your own library.