Open access to scientific literature on Internet is a concept which is supposed to change librarians' work. The aim of the thesis was to examine librarians' perception of Open access. A questionnaire survey was conducted among librarians at libraries with specialisation in technique, natural sciences, medicine and pharmacy in Sweden. Even though Open access can be regarded as an alarming for librarians' work, the results of the survey showed that the future of the librarians' profession can be positive if they flexibly adopt their work routines according to changes in publication forms and library users' needs..

This thesis aims to explore how musicologists reason about publishing their articles in open-access journals. What is the challenge they face and what are the possibilities musicologists are concerned about? For the method I used open-ended and structured interviews based on four factors: trustworthiness, accessibility, reaching the readers and status of the publishing media. Musicologists are positive to the open-access concept and are willing to submit their papers to open-access journals. They think that the accessibility of the articles is going to increase when they publish them in open-access journals.

To publish research articles by the means of Open access is to provide them for free to the reader. An increasing number of universities around the world have begun to institute Open access policies regarding their researchers academic output, requiring them to primarily publish in Open access journals and / or archive their pre- or post- prints in institutional archives.The aim of this this thesis is to explore how the adoption of the Open access policy at the Swedish Universi- ty of Agricultural Sciences in 2008 has affected how their researchers publish and if this has had any effect on how their academic output are cited and distributed online. To reach this goal a combination of bibliometric and altmetric methods were used as well as cross-referencing between Scopus, Altmetric.com, Google Scholar and the SHERPA/RoMEO database.The results points towards a mostly Open access positive trend with an increase in articles published in jour- nals that allow archiving of both pre- and post-prints. There also seems to be a correlation between these journals and which kind of articles gets the most mentions in social media..

Open access has played a significant part in the development of scholarlycommunication. Today, several research funding agencies around the worldrequires that the results of the research it supports must be published openaccess where the underlying idea is that publicly funded research should befree and available to all users. The purpose of this thesis is to discuss the issueof Open access publishing from the perspective of researchers in the field ofodontology, focused on their attitudes, behaviors and publishing experienceswith Open access. Through a qualitative interview study with fiveodontological researchers, the results have been compared to previous studieson researchers' attitudes and experiences with Open access. The results showthat both knowledge and experience with Open access publishing is fairly lowamong the participating scientists.

Self-archiving as a way to provide Open access to research publications is gaining ground in the area of scholarly publishing. An increasing number of research funders and universities are mandating Open access for output associated with their research, which calls for evaluation of the effects of the phenomenon.This two years master?s thesis aims to investigate researchers? experiences of self-archiving. A qualitative web survey was conducted and answered by 41 researchers from several different countries, and a vast majority of the respondents concur with the principle of Open access. Although self-archiving shows not to be a guarantee of increased impact for the single researcher, the study shows that might be the case.

The aim of this Master thesis was to examine how libraries at Swedish colleges and universities make Open access journals in physics available to users. We examined if, where, and how the 50 Open access journals that are listed in the Directory of Open access (DOAJ) under the heading Physics (General) were made available to the public at 19 Swedish colleges and universities. We also examined possible patterns regarding qualities in the Open access journals and to what extent the libraries made them available. For this descriptive statistic was used. The selection of library portals that were included in the study were those Swedish colleges and universities that teach physics.

Since the 1990?s Open access has developed into an alternative model for scientific publication. Today an increasing political interest in promoting Open access is commonly channeled through the implementation of policies by research funders. However, in the scientific community the uptake and acceptance of the model has been of notably different character.This Master?s thesis examines the understanding of and attitudes towards Open access among eight senior Swedish researchers and how these have been affected by the implementation of the Swedish Research Council?s Open access-policy as implemented in 2010.

The natural sciences and the humanities are associated with differentpublishing patterns. Open access publishing are mainly associated withthe publishing patterns of the natural sciences. Many Swedishuniversities and research funders are proponents of Open accesspublishing, what will that trend mean to the scholars with a publishingpattern not corresponding to Open access? In this paper literary scholarsare interviewed for the purpose of learning the motives and strategieswhich form their publishing pattern, and how they relate to Open accesspublishing. The results show that literary scholars are less competitiveand hold a more gentle knowledge-sharing ideal, than natural scientists.The drive to gain acknowledgment and the recognition of colleagues inorder to collect academic capital as Bourdieu describes the academicfield is still present though.

Detta är en utvärdering av hur väl Open access mottagits av forskare vid humanistisk fakultet vidUmeå universitet. Empirin är samlad med hjälp av kvalitativ intervjumetod, intervjuerna hölls med ettantal forskare vid humanistiska fakulteten. Genom en sammanfattning av hur vetenskapligapublikationer har sett ut och förändrats genom historien går det att se att utvecklingen rör sig mot OpenAccess. Eftersom att det i dagsläget (2012) utformas nationell policy kring Open access samt attforskningsfinansiärer börjar ställa krav på att forskare ska publicera sina forskningsresultat i OpenAccess ? är det intressant att se hur väl Open access mottagits av forskare eftersom det är de som stårför själva produktionen av materialet.

The aim of this bachelor-thesis is to study how postgraduates approach Open access during times of change within scholarly communication. Our theoretical framework is based upon Knorr Cetinas epistemic cultures and Cullen & Chawners theory that there is a paradigmatic conflict within scholarly communication due to the fact that Open access has failed to reach the same level of prominence among researchers as it has within research libraries. We interviewed six postgraduates at Malmö högskola in order to find answers to our research questions. We identified a shared epistemic culture among the postgraduates, which can be explained by the fact that being postgraduates, they all share similar experiences and values. We chose to call this epistemic culture the horizontal epistemic culture.

To self-archive is to make research publications freely accessible by depositing them in an open digital archive or on a public website. The aim of this thesis is to explore what Swedish scientists think of self-archiving, what they know about it and how they make use of it, in order to understand why they do not self-archive more actively.A web survey was conducted which was answered by 296 scientists at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU). Results show that only 24 % have previous experience of self-archiving, but that a majority is willing to self-archive if there are no legal objections or if it is demanded by the research funder. The most important reasons why many scientists do not self-archive are that they feel uncertain about copyright issues and/or lack knowledge about self-archiving..

Dissatisfaction with the current market for scientific publishing, dominated by a few large publishers able to obtain high subscription fees, gave birth to the Open access movement. One problem for the Open access movement, which aims at making research results freely available, is that scientists are reluctant to publish in journals that are free on the Internet, so called Open access journals. This master's thesis aims at showing how scientists reason about their own publishing in scientific journals. It is investigated which factors are important when scientist decide on which journals to send their articles. The aim is to increase the understanding of scientists' views on Open access.Six interviews were conducted with scientists in Biomedicine at Lund University.

Open access (OA) is a publishing model aimed at increasingthe access to academic research results. The object of thisstudy was to contrast nine colleges and four fundingorganizations in Scandinavia with mandatory OA-policies,and to study how they put OA into practice.Inspired by the Open access Spectrum (OAS), a tool used toappreciate the OA of academic journals, the aim was tograde the policy documents of the colleges using the OASmodel.The study also compares how the colleges implementtheir OA-policies as well as how, and if, the demands fromthe funding organizations are reflected in the policies of thecolleges.The findings show that the OAS is not a tool designed forgreen OA and that all the information needed for the scale tofunction was not found in the policy documents we studied.A selection of the colleges has some demands in theirpolicies, although most of them allow exceptions to be madefrom the mandatory policy. This is shown to be mainly aquestion of academic freedom, and copyright, or rather thanthe degree to which the scientist and the publisher can cometo an agreement on allowing the information to be accessiblethrough OA.The study proposes that the way to change this may be toincrease the demands on OA in the policies, and that the bestsolution might be in stipulations within the employmentcontracts between the individual colleges and scientist..

Since the beginning of the 21st century the Open access-movement, which advocates free online distribution of scholarly information, has gained momentum. Authors can provide Open access to their work in two main ways: by depositing a copy of their research output in an e-print archive and by publishing in Open access journals. During the past few years, universities and other research institutions throughout the world have established institutional repositories to manage, preserve and provide access to the intellectual output of the university/research institution. The purpose of this master?s thesis is to describe the implementation of an institutional repository at the Swedish University College of Borås.

This study examines the scholarly communication activities in two scientific fields, chemistry and economics, in a Polish context. The dissertation aims at investigating what characterises the publishing choices of researchers and what supplementary forms for the dissemination of research output are used by scholars. In addition, the paper is looking into what are the views and awareness of Open access and institutional repositories within this scientific community. This thesis gives the results of semi-structured interviews and an online survey at two academic faculties at a Polish technical university. As its theoretical framework, the study uses Whitley?s theory of the intellectual and social organisation of academic fields and Latour and Woolgar?s study regarding various motivations for publishing.