Open Access at Swedish Universities and University Colleges : From Headwind to Tailwind?

From the autumn of 2008 up to the autumn of 2009 five seminars have been carried out at Swedish universities and university colleges with the purpose of increasing researchers’ knowledge of Open Access. The seminars have been arranged within the project ”Researcher meetings on Open Access” which is funded by the program OpenAcess.se of the National Library of Sweden. Open Access is, today, a relatively well-known concept at universities and university colleges, which presumably is one of the reasons why all the seminars have attracted a great number of researchers and doctoral candidates. The details on how Open Access publishing works are, however, not equally well known, and therefore this type of seminars work in an informative and elucidatory way concerning, for example, parallel publishing, copyright, and increased visibility. It is clear that the libraries now find themselves in a new phase regarding their work with Open Access. Focused information work will be needed for a time to come at our Swedish universities and university colleges on account of the position recently adopted by the Swedish Research Council in regard to Open Access demanding that research funded by the Council must be openly accessible within 6 months after publication. This means that the research libraries will keep playing an important role. In this article we, who have participated in the project, want to convey our experiences from the seminars which have been carried out and discuss the further work of the research libraries to inform and support researchers in matters concerning Open Access