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Description
In Finland, most academic journals are published by small scholarly societies. The main sources of income for the journals are usually subscriptions, society funding collected from membership fees, and government subsidy.
About 45% of the 95 Finnish journals receiving government subsidy get by with less than 10.000 euros a year, and only a handful of them have an annual budget of more than 50.000 euros. Many of the journals have been unwilling to move to Open Access publishing as they have been depending on subscription income, mostly from individual subscribers.
In 2015, the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies and the National Library of Finland received project funding from the Ministry of Education and Culture to improve the situation. The aims of the project have been twofold. On the one hand, it has been developing a new up-to-date technical infrastructure for the Finnish scholarly journals; on the other hand, it has been sketching out a new funding model for the open access journals.
The Federation of Learned Societies has been hosting a centralized Open Journal Systems based publishing platform for the journals of its member organizations since 2006. In this part of the project, the platform was modernized and re-branded. There was extensive technical development done to improve the service, including an upgrade to OJS 3.
The Federation of Learned Societies negotiated a deal with CrossRef to provide DOIs for the journals using the new service. The new platform also supports the use of ORCID identifiers for authors. With additional funding received from OpenAire, the use of XML format was enabled for the journals.
The new Journal.fi service was launched in January 2017. Currently there are 40 journals using the platform, with many more waiting for their turn to join.
As far as the new funding model is concerned, the aim is to build up a consortium-based model in which the Finnish research organizations would provide funding for domestic OA journals. The funding model will require the collection of reliable and comprehensive data on all of the articles the Finnish research organizations publish in the participating journals.
The sum each of the organisations would need to contribute would consist of two parts, the first being relatively small fixed charge, which would cover the expenses caused by the administration of the consortium. The other part would be calculated based on the number of peer-reviewed articles published by each organization in participating journals. This sum would be distributed to the journals, and it would cover the loss of subscription and membership income.
The biggest challenge for the model is that the Finnish research libraries have so far been spending very little money on the acquisition of the domestic journals. This means that extra money will be needed as it is not possible to simply flip the current funding model.
The negotiations between stakeholders are still underway, but there is some optimism that an agreement will be reached. The domestic publishing channels are very important for many of the Finnish universities. In the current funding model for the Finnish universities 13% of all state funding is distributed based on the number and quality of peer-reviewed publications.
