Open Access policies in Switzerland
Swiss National Open Access Strategy
In December 2015, the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) commissioned swissuniversities to elaborate, with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation, a national strategy for Open Access to publications.
The Swiss National Strategy on Open Access was adopted on 31 January 2017.
It aims to achieve the following objective in accordance with international benchmarks: by 2024, all scholarly publication activity in Switzerland should be OA, all scholarly publications funded by public money must be freely accessible on the internet. The OA landscape will consist of a mix of OA models (Green and Gold Open Access).
The National Open Access Strategy can be found here and the action plan proposed to achieve the objectives can be downloaded here .
Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
The National Open Access Strategy approved in spring 2017 and the Action Plan of February 2018 represent important steps in establishing Open Access in Switzerland. They aim to ensure that all publications financed with public money are openly accessible by 2024.
The SNSF has decided to implement Open Access for all publications emanating from SNSF-funded research already as of 2020.
To facilitate this policy, the SNSF has defined a range of measures and issued new regulations, which entered into force on 1 April 2018. These measures focus on the funding of Gold Open Access publication costs (for articles, books and chapters) independently from projects budgets through the introduction of a new Open Access Platform.
Nonetheless, Green Open Access is also compliant with the SNSF's Open Access mandate as long as the embargo period is no longer than 6 monts for articles, and 12 months for books and book chapters.
The SNSF DOES NOT fund hybrid Open Access, although authors are free to use that way.
The regulations on the funding of Open Access publications can be found here (FR). A shorter fact-sheet by the SNSF will be available soon. In the meantime, UNIL provides its researchers with the summary table below:
