National Open Access Desk

There are 8 universities, 8 University Colleges and a number of other public and private research institutions in Denmark. The public research is organised under the Ministry of Higher Education and Science.

The Ministry of Higher Education and Science manages and monitors the Danish Open Access strategy.

Denmark holds a National strategy for Open Access. The strategy states that the implementation of Open Access is to take place through the green model – i.e. parallel filling of quality-assured research articles in institutional or subject-specific archives (repositories) with Open Access. However, the strategy does not exclude the use of the golden model as long as it does not increase the expenses for publication.

Two central principles form the basis for the strategy:

• The implementation of the Open Access is to support the possibility for Danish researchers to continue to publish in the most recognised national and international journals, and also the possibility to publish.
• For the sake of research and society, it is stressed that it is crucial that the aggregate public expenditure to research publication is not increased significantly because of the implementation of Open Access.

The goal is 100% Open Access to publicly funded research publications by 2025.

Each of the 8 Danish universities has their own local Open Science Support Unit, typically based at the university libraries.

DeiC is preparing the development of a national infrastructure for RDM, support and training.

Among funders, there is a mixed picture in terms of OA policies. Unlike most other Nordic countries Denmark has quite large private research foundations. None of the largest Danish public and private research funding bodies - the Independent Research Fund Denmark, the Innovation Fund Denmark, the DNRF, the Carlsberg Foundation, the Novo Nordisk Foundation – have a policy regarding open access to research data, with the Lundbeck Foundation as an exception.

The Lundbeck company and the Lundbeck Foundation have a clear policy on Open Access, disclosing clinical trial information and results summaries in public registries and shares clinical data generated by or sponsored by Lundbeck. Although all the private foundations generally seem to acknowledge the principle of Open Science, there is also a tradition of not adopting policies that are fundamentally driven by state actors.

The publicly funded research foundations have adopted a common OA policy based on the Danish Open Access Strategy. Only one of the private foundations in Denmark has done so. These foundations then require grant holders to make research results and articles publicly available. Data is specifically excluded from this requirement, and OA publication costs are not eligible for funding (and obviously neither is data management costs).

Public Danish funders with an Open Access Policy:

• Danish Council for Independent Research (DFF)
• Danish National Research Foundation
• Danish Ministry of Science, Technology & Innovation
• Innovationsfonden 
• Nordic Council of Ministers

Private Danish funders with an Open Access Policy:

• The Velux Foundations: Villum Foundation and Velux Foundation - (in Danish only)

Denmark has 8 major Institutions which are listed here:

• Aarhus University OA policy
• Aalborg University OA policy (in Danish only)
• Copenhagen Business School
• Copenhagen university – no institutional policy
• Danish Technical University
• IT university – not public
• Roskilde University (in Danish only)
• University of Southern Denmark