Open Access in Estonia: the Information Society
Estonia is very advanced in e-government infrastructure compared to the UK. You can’t fail to be impressed by its e-Resident initiative. In 2007 it introduced a Mobile-ID for mobile phones that permits secure authentication and digital signatures. With a population of only about 1.5M the effects of government initiatives are seen quickly and data privacy is legally protected, including access to medical records which are owned by patients. It’s fair to say that in this context Open Access and Open Data could be seen as a natural progression. The University of Tartu is leading in open scholarship – sixty-percent of Estonia’s successfully defended doctoral theses are generated at Tartu annually. It also has six Centres of Research Excellence of which two are European Commission Centres of Excellence.
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| “In Estonia, anyone can go to a state forest and extract birch sap from a birch tree. “ Slide 12 from Estonian ICT Demo Center (2014) Estonian information society presentation slideshow |
In 2012 it began participating in an 8-month project under the auspices of the EIFL (Electronic Information for Libraries) Open Access and Open Data in Estonia Project. The project lead was the University of Tartu Library (UTL). Its main outcomes were:
- Introducing policy change to the Estonian Research Council and the possibility of a national Open Access policy.
- Minting digital object identifers (DOs). UTL has joined DataCite and is now minting its own digital object identifiers (DOIs) for research data sets. St Andrews has been able to do this since April this year.
- Training researchers in self-archiving resulting in a significant increase in deposit of accepted manuscripts into UTL’s repository.
- Publishing journals Open Access using the open journal system (OJS) platform.
- Publishing monographs Open Access. Tartu currently has 17 Open Access monographs on OAPEN.
- A network of credible champions has been established to advocate Open Access among their peers.