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Since the Berlin Declaration of October 2003, Open Access (OA) has been a strategic goal of many research libraries and universities. The open dissemination of knowledge should be able to take place more efficiently and comprehensively with the help of the free internet and should offer an alternative for the increasingly expensive licence payments to large monopolistic publishers.

The initiators were probably aware that a sustainable cultural change would have to be set in motion that would not happen overnight due to multiple dependencies. And so even in 2019 we have not yet reached 100% OA, although according to a study commissioned by the European Commission, Switzerland in particular is playing a leading role with over 50% in the implementation of the ambitious goal.

The national Open Access strategy adopted by swissuniversities at the beginning of 2017 should help making all future Swiss research publications openly accessible by 2024. The strategy is based on a mix of gold, green and platinum Open Access measures. Currently, the most important tool is the ongoing negotiations with the publishers Elsevier, Springer and Wiley. As already practised in various other countries, so-called Read&Publish contracts are not only intended to ensure access to literature, but also to make all publications by Swiss authors freely accessible worldwide with a CC-BY licence for the best possible subsequent use. These big deals would make a large amount of scientific literature available as OA in one fell swoop. This would have the advantage for researchers that cumbersome individual invoices for Article Processing Charges (APCs) would in future be covered by a central university budget.

These measures are coordinated with the funding schemes of the Swiss National Science Foundation, which has extended its OA guidelines since October 2018 by a generous adoption of APCs and is aiming for a full implementation of OA as early as 2020.

The recently controversially discussed PlanS, which was initiated by a consortium of European research funders and is also meeting with interest in China and the USA, is intended to increase the pressure on major publishers to switch their existing business models to Open Access publications worldwide.

As part of the national OA strategy, the existing support services at the UZH will also be expanded, depending on the developments mentioned above. We will be pleased to keep you up to date on our website. An overview of current OA memberships and publication funds in the humanities and social sciences can be found here: https://www.hbz.uzh.ch/en/open-access-und-open-science/publizieren.html

Contact Team OA: oai@hbz.uzh.ch