26 universities to Open Access publishing model

Turre Legal counseled a consortium of Finland’s universities of applied science (aka. AMK) to create a digital repository for theses and research publications . The project adopted a joint Open Access mandate that means that annually 20.000 academic thesis and thousands of scholarly articles written by the staff of the AMK will be openly accessible online.

After 1 January 2010, the Universities of Applied Sciences will require all teachers and researchers who work at the universities to save a copy of their research essays that are published in scientific publications, or a university publication series, in the open electronic library, Theseus.

According to Harvard’s open access guru Peter SuberThis is, by far, the largest set of institutions to adopt a joint OA mandate.”

As a part of the project Turre’s partner Herkko Hietanen has been translating Creative Commons 3.0 licenses to Finnish legal system. The license translation and adoption  is at its final stretches and waits for the CC headquarters’s approval. Theseus enables students and teachers to choose a Creative Commons license to their works if they so desire.

Here is a poster of the project and here is an article published in SciecomInfo.

Here is the current draft of the CC 3.0 license for you consideration. Comments to the license are welcomed.