The stick or the carrot? An approach to Open Access

In Norway, as internationally, Open Access (OA) policy states that officially funded research should be open to the public. This paper touches upon the EU’s new OA-initiative (Horizon 2020) before giving a short description of the guidelines from the Norwegian Government and the National Research Council of Norway, as well as NTNU’s and other Norwegian Universities ’ OA policies. Through the Norwegian CRIStin database, which was established in 2010, Norway has a national system for registration of academic publishing. Reporting these and other data concerning academic activities to the government partially dictates funding. Together with institutional archives for realizing green OA and funds for gold OA, the CRIStin database provides a sound basis for openness. NTNU is the second largest university in Norway. In 2012, its researchers published more than 3000 scientific papers and review articles. Only a few of them were published OA and even less were archived as green OA. Do guidelines and measures provide a clear mandate for convincing researchers to publish OA? NTNU University library took the initiative in 2012 to create a publication fund for financing APCs in gold OA publications. The fund was launched March 1 2013 with the library as administrator. Thi