National Strategy - swissuniversities

The Swiss National Open Access Strategy aims at making all publicly funded scholarly publications freely available. This strategy - revised in 2024 - focuses on providing immediate, machine-readable access to scientific knowledge at no charge and with no embargo. This open dissemination of research findings brings added value to society and academia.

The updated Open Access Strategy builds on the 2017 Swiss National Open Access Strategy and drives the paradigm shift towards open access forward, which is to be completed by 2032 at the latest. swissuniversities and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) are dedicated to building a robust open access landscape. They do so by specifying the systemic and cultural framework conditions, which are required to address current developments and challenges in the dynamic open access landscape.

To achieve this vision, the strategy emphasises developing and coordinating infrastructure and services (for diamond and green open access in particular), establishing a supportive legal framework, negotiating with publishers and fostering an open access culture within research communities. The universities, swissuniversities and the SNSF self-commit to implementing the revised Strategy according to their institutional contexts, with the Delegation Open Science of swissuniversities ensuring the coordination and collaboration between the partners.

In 2017, swissuniversities and SNSF have set an ambitious vision of achieving 100% open access to publicly funded scholarly publications with the first Swiss National Strategy on Open Access. Pursuing this vision has considerably advanced the open access transformation with open access publications rising and closed articles dropping from 50% in 2017 to 27% in 2022. Open Access has been established as an idea and introduced as a policy across universities in Switzerland. In order to build on this progress and to be aligned with the international and national developments, the two strategy partners have initiated a review of the 2017 strategy and present a revised, forward-looking strategy.

The Strategy Review was in the responsibility of the Delegation Open Science, which ensured coordination with the SNSF as its partner of the Open Access Strategy.

To prepare the Strategy Review a Background Report was conducted that includes an analysis of the Open Access landscape. In a second step, a revised version of the Swiss National Open Access Strategy was developed. Between December 2023 and January 2024, a consultation on the draft of the revised Swiss National Open Access Strategy was launched inviting the higher education institutions, the SNSF, as partner of the strategy, the national Education, Research, and Innovation (ERI) partners and further stakeholders to comment on the document. The report on the results of the consultation summarises how the feedback was processed.

The original document of the Swiss National Open Access Strategy was drafted in English and will be translated into German, French, and Italian. The translated versions are currently being prepared.