A pen, a notebook, and an abacus on a table.

A national consortium

The collective purchasing power of the Bibsam Consortium is an important part of the transition to a model of information provision based on open access and the publication of scientific articles.

Photo
Maja Atterstig, The National Library of Sweden
Image rights
The image is free to use if the photographer's name is credited

Bibsam Consortium

Since 1996, the National Library of Sweden has negotiated licence agreements for electronic information resources and publishing on behalf of Swedish universities and university colleges, as well as public agencies and research institutes.

The Bibsam Consortium consists of 96 institutions. In 2025, the turnover was approximately EUR 61 million, with the ten largest universities accounting for around 75 per cent of this amount.

As the Bibsam Consortium is not a legal entity, agreements are entered into between each institution and the respective vendor. Through a power of attorney, the participating institutions authorise the National Librarian to sign agreements on their behalf.

Bibsam Consortium’s action plan

The Bibsam Consortium action plan is intended to guide negotiations with scholarly publishers. The aim is to facilitate the open publication of scholarly results, to bring about a redirection of payment streams from a subscription-based to an open access publishing system, and to achieve transparency, an overview of and reduced expenses for scholarly publishing.

Against this background and the SUHF recommendation regarding charting Sweden's path beyond the transformative agreements (2023:7) External link., the Bibsam Consortium Steering Committee has adopted the following action plan:

  • that the Consortium should not sign agreements for reading and publishing in hybrid journals, and instead only negotiate for publication in open access journals; this approach should be implemented from 2026 and apply to all open journals, regardless of publisher
  • that new pathways to open publishing are promoted and supported and alternative business models are developed, and that researcher-driven journals that want to migrate from traditional publishers to other platforms are supported
  • that publication occurs under an open license, in accordance with the FAIR principles, and that copyright conditions to promote open access, for example via so-called secondary publication rights, are explored