The vast majority of the University of Helsinki´s articles are published open access

The number of open access publications has increased at the University of Helsinki by eight percentage points over a three-year period. The impact of the University’s open access publications is also considerably higher than that of its other publications.

The share of the University’s open access scholarly publications was 65.7% in November 2020. In March 2021 the figure was 74% (Source: Rapo reporting system, 29 March 2021). The result adapts the national progress of the share of open publications in Finnish universities and higher education. You can read more about statistics of the open access from the year 2020 in ThinkOpen-blog (in Finnish).

The University of Helsinki Library sends reminders of publications that not have been self-archived yet. The library also deposits the publications of University of Helsinki researchers and organizes targeted self-archiving campaings. During the latest campaing a total of 3,327 publications from the period of 2018–2020, were archived.

Open access publishing also supports the strategy of the University of Helsinki: Openness is a fundamental precondition for the implementation of University´s core duties. Hence the support of the management of faculties and units has big significance in the reaching of open access objectives.  

High impact metrics for open access publishing 

  • The impact* of the University’s open access publications (1.97) is clearly higher than that of its other publications (1.27).  
  • The publication analyses also revealed that researchers benefit from citations received through open access publishing. The impact of open access publications is significantly higher, see the post from the last year.
  • The impact figures of the University faculties from the year 2020 is presented in Flamma news (link to intranet, requires logging in with UH account)

Self-archiving is a free-of-charge method of open access publishing for researchers  

  • Self-archiving should be integrated into the publishing process so that researchers store the manuscript version of each publication in Tuhat while adding publications´reference information in the system. 
  • The post-print version can also be sent to Helsinki University Library for archiving: openaccess@helsinki.fi
  • Self-archiving can be used to meet funder requirements for open access publishing. 

*The analyses of impact refers to the comparison of citations to the global average which is 1. For example, if the figure is 2, it means that publications receive twice as many citations as the world average.

Impact analyses: Helsinki University Library´s metrics team