Open Access (OA) is becoming increasingly important in the area of scientific journals. More than 3500 journals have been established as OA journals or have changed from Toll Access (TA) to OA. This means that somewhere between 10 and 15 per cent of scientific journals today are OA. Most areas of science will have one or more OA journal available for publishing articles in. The quality varies both in TA and OA journals, but of the 11 Norwegian OA journals 7 are accepted as journals that credits in the financing of Higher Education Institutions, i.e. that the institutions receive money for publishing articles in these journals.

Developing economies

OA journals emerge all over the world, with Asia and South and Central America being major regions. Western Europe and North America are major players but do not dominate in the field of OA journals to the same extent that they dominate in the field of TA journals. This could indicate that emerging economies find it beneficial to adopt OA models instead of TA, finding OA the most efficient model. There is no question that researchers and students, not to mention the general public, in emerging economies have a much greater chance of accessing OA content than TA content.

Future developments

There are a lot of promising developments to be seen today, but there are still challenges to overcome in order to make scientific results freely available.